John Wright - Titans of Chaos

Quentin said, "Lady Phoebe." Then he shrugged and smiled, and said to Victor. "Sorry, but that was worded as a direct command..."

I said, "Leader, listen to me! I can see what is going on. The laws of nature in the room-"

Vanity looked like she was about to break down. "Amelia is now second in command. Do what she says."

Oops.

All eyes turned toward me, including the penetrating, silver-white eyes of the girl hanging in midair outside the window.

She smiled a truly chilling smile, as cold as the far side of the moon. "Come out, come out, prelapsarian. I part my hounds and give you a running start: You look swift. Your ham is firm and thigh is sleek. Am I not generous? Otherwise you are surrounded."

I said, "Colin, Andromeda gave you this room and you gave it to me, right? In the eyes of the law, how far down, or how far up, do the boundaries go?"

Quentin answered, "To the core of the Earth, and up to infinity."

The moment he said that, the uncertainty collapsed, and I saw, like a forcefield, the lines flush with the square floor of the room. Four walls of light dwindling to a vanishing point far underfoot, and reaching upward like a slowly expanding cone overhead. The moral energy lines were gathered around it, trying to get in, but they could not cross the boundary. My property.

Colin grunted. "What he said. Leader, let me rip her head off, huhn?"

Victor said, "Leader, your orders?"

"Everyone hold hands," I said.

Lady Phoebe was right. I was fast.

I pulled the suddenly weightless team "past" the ceiling, the attic, and the roof tiles without disturbing them. I was still directly above the room, still within the cone of my legal property, and accelerating straight up. Zero to Mach four in thirty seconds.

Victor slid through without much problem, though it did kill him, until I tilted his monad back in place and the mechanical processes of his life started again. The fact that Colin had been able to make his deadly dream-environment friendly to me made me think I could do the same for Victor.

(In hindsight, Colin should have been the one impossible to pull into the fourth dimension, but maybe he can turn off his anti-Amelia-ness somehow. Maybe he was inspired to pass through the roof.)

I was two miles up, going Mach ten, before the dogs of cloud closed in on me. The blind, narrow-headed greyhounds were horrible to look at, and their teeth were like icicles. But they hung to every side of me, running straight up as I soared, some leaping ahead, baying and barking, some falling behind. I ignited the atmosphere around me to form a multicolored aura of free-willed air to protect my friends, and Vanity made a quick pass with her green stone to give us laws of nature favorable to our attempt.

She must have done something clever, because the dogs still could not close with us, but our other abilities were permitted. Victor was turning to gold, his flesh peeling away in grotesque strips so that a harder integument underneath could take its place. A darkness gathered around Quentin, and he seemed to burn with black fire, but the acceleration was not hurting him, and his speed was as great as mine, or Victor's.

Colin was hanging on for dear life. No, sorry, he was grinning like a devil, with one arm clenching my waist, and one arm around Vanity. He was slipping slowly downward, so his nose was somewhere pressed into my bosom, and Vanity was being likewise crushed up against his lusty self. Jerk. But he must have been inspired, or something, because the friction and acceleration were not even mussing his hair.

Underfoot, I heard Lady Phoebe wind her hunting horn, a long, chilling note.

At that noise, Victor pointed a finger, and an invisible beam punched a clean hole though the skull and breast of two of the clamoring dogs at his heels, passed through the clouds below, and left a circle in the cloudbank as neat as a mechanical punch might make. The Huntress must have been directly below. The horn-note squawked and died.

Victor sent a radio beam toward me, a silent commutation that ignored the hurricane of wind noise all around us. "She is doing magic. I can hold some of it back, but she has millions of ergs of electromagnetic life-forms, many more than Quentin commands."

Up. Straight up. There was nowhere else to go. I could not go right or left. If I went into the fourth dimension, I would be going much slower, and I could also see her dog things were partly in my paradigm: They were flickering in and out of the moonlight of earthland and dreamland freely. If I left three-dimensional space entirely, they might get me.

The goddess was coming. She was not so fast as I was, not so fast as her own dogs, but I could see the winding strands of energy reaching into the past and future. I was gripped with the sick, sudden certainty that, in the same way that Mavors the Warrior could not be defeated in melee, Phoebe the Huntress could not lose her prey.

Cloud. The dogs had the internal nature of clouds. They were made out of cloud. An atmospheric phenomenon.

I could not reach escape velocity. Orbital velocity is a different thing. But...

The air should have been too thin for speech, or life, at this altitude, but the free air blanketing us, and Vanity's imposition of more Aristotelian laws of nature that did not worry about concepts like friction and air pressure, allowed us to talk.

I put my mouth to Vanity's ear and shouted. "Call your ship!"

She yelled back, "It's a ship, not a plane!"

"Call your ship! That's an order!"

"There is no water up here!" she said in a voice of misery.

The dark world was underfoot. The pattern of city lights followed the coastlines of England and, across the channel, Normandy. A curving red line of fire defined the distant dawn to the east. To either side was thin stratosphere. And still the pale, blind dogs chased us. And overhead:..

The shadowy form of Quentin pointed with an ebon finger. "I see a river," he said. By some trick of his, the words were clear and close within our ears, despite the raging noise of our terrible acceleration.

Vanity's eyes followed where he pointed. There, mystical, wondrous, were the million gem-gleaming stars of the Milky Way, a stream of light.

Silhouetted against the jeweled splendor of the Milky Way was the slender silhouette of a Greek trireme. The solemn eyes painted on the prow were looking at us.

I said, "She has to match velocities with us, because we need to remain geosynchronous above the room. The dogs will have a chance to attack when we board. Um, everyone, if my bubble of free-willed air around us breaks when we cross to the ship, you'll get an attack of flatulence. Let it out, Chaucer-like, if you know what I mean, or else your internal organs might get damaged.

Colin! I am counting on you to kill and slay and maim like Cuchulainn, or one of those heroes from your ridiculous Irish epics. Once we board, Vanity looks for a secret compartment that is airtight; Colin and I saw her find a trapdoor leading into a hold, so maybe she can find a pressurized cabin. And then, um, and then..."