John Wright - Titans of Chaos

I saw a second bundle leaving him and leading back to me. He had made a promise to me to show my card to Archer. It was a dim connection, but enough that Deimos could sense a threat to me as well. If I were killed, he could not keep his promise.

I am lucky Deimos had made that promise, because I could see through his tangle of moral connections something I could not see radiating from myself.

A final bundle had reached down from a point immensely remote in space, right to my position, glowing, shivering, and crawling with motes and flickers of communication-purpose. It was as if the line was shouting to someone, HERE! SHE IS HERE!

"Damn!" I breathed.

Wives of the Psychopomp

"Do you see anyone?" asked Vanity over the phone.

"The money. I spent the money..."

I could dimly hear, in the background, Quentin's voice saying, "It's ap Cymru. Amelia's in debt to him now. That's why they gave her such an absurd amount of money. The obligation was not actual before, because she herself never spent it. Tell her to throw away whatever it is she just bought..."

Vanity: "Did you hear Quentin?"

"Yes." I tossed the sleek black guitar into a Dumpster filled with packing material. And immediately: "Didn't work," I said. The obligation lines continued to lead to me, not to it. Oh well.

I picked up the guitar again. No reason to throw away a perfectly good guitar.

I said to Vanity: "Which floor are you on?"

Vanity said: "I am not in the store anymore. I led the boys into a secret elevator behind the jewelry department when I felt someone find you. I am hoping it will lead down to a sewer or-Listen! Get to the docks, get to the shore. Or to the nearest body of water. I am ordering my ship to go find you."

Vanity shouted over the tiny phone speaker: "Do not dare tell me you are going to lead them away! What if we get attacked by Dr. Fell and you are not there? What if Mrs. Wren attacks you, and it is something Quentin could save you from by saying the name of a fish? We are all in danger if you are in danger! Don't you dare run off on us or be brave, or so help me God, I will never forgive you, Amelia Armstrong Windrose!"

Quentin, in the background, softly: "Colin can find her. She still owes him a favor."

I should have run back into the store, but the fact that streamers of obligation-energy were reaching from Deimos to this area frightened me irrationally. This store was part of a trap. Vanity was not in it, anyway.

I ran from the alley to the street. It was bright and crowded for a nighttime street, and the night air was warm.

People were staring at me, so I slowed down to a brisk trot. Just a lady in a leather jacket and cap, out for a walk with her space-age guitar! Everything is normal!

As I continued to walk, I noticed that everything did look normal. Whatever alarm I had just set off, it might be weeks or years before ap Cymru answered. Maybe I was safe for now.

I pulled the phone from my pocket and held it up to my ear. "Vanity! I'm in the main street in front of the shop. There are people all around me, humans. If we're right about the gods, they will not show themselves in front of a crowd. I am making my way West on..."

That was when I noticed the phone was dead. There was no click of disconnection, no hum of the power shutting off, just... silence.

"Vanity? Hello...?"

All the bright, noisy cars moving from light to light along the street now slowed and halted. Radio music banging from the nearer cars squawked and stopped.

The pedestrians, wherever they were, beneath the neon signs at the bus stops, in the middle of the crosswalk, on the sidewalks, fell, or slumped, or keeled over.

Blackness rushed across the cityscape as lights from the building across the way went out. The streetlamps turned dark. A thousand teeny tiny machine noises, radios, the hissing of the portable popcorn popper of a late-night street vendor, the whirr of distant automatic doors opening and closing, the hum from refrigerators, elevators, other motors... all muttered and fell into a deep, tomblike hush.

The clock on the bell tower of the bank across the street from my position emitted one last peal, and then stopped, its second hand frozen. The electronic sign turned all white as all the bulbs lit up, and then went black.

I felt a pressure in the sleep centers of my brain, activity in my pons attempting to trigger narcolepsy, changes in my medulla oblongata trying to switch my brain-wave pattern from alpha-beta consciousness to delta-wave dream state.

If my brain continued to obey the laws of nature, I would have to sleep, and immediately.

I jumped into another dimension.

I was through and "past" the stone surface of the building in front of me in a moment. I saw the cubicles and interior spaces of the building, the pipes beneath the street, the interstices between the walls, all laid out like a flat blueprint. I saw the various textures of internal natures: greedy billboards, generous water pipes, frowning walls, ambitious electrical generators, patient power lines.

At this point I was some nine hundred feet above the street, and about forty feet or so in the

"blue" direction of overspace, not so far away from the plane of Earth's home continuum that I could not see it, albeit everything was now made soft and mysterious by a haze of blue, a Doppler shift created by the curving metric.

Through the blue haze, I could see other planes of other continua around me, to my left and right, up and down, before me, behind me, and blue and red of me. Only then did I notice what was odd about this four-space. Unlike the street level, it was lit. It was much brighter here than the analogous four-space "above" England. I was seeing farther than I ever had before.

I looked "above" and "behind" me for the source of the light.

The light (actually, volumes of an energy for which we have no name) was coming from (issuing in concentric hyperspheres) a curving bubble or blister in a nearby continuum. This continuum was in a plane parallel to Earth's continuum. It lay about a hundred yards in the "blue" direction, and had formed this reddish blister on its hypersurface, which was swelling and shimmering. The sight reminded me of a steel door being melted, as if the metal were expanding and about to explode outward---

The sight made me feel, despite that I was in the freedom of hyperspace, claustrophobic.

In that gushing light, I could see that the hyperspace was swarming with traffic. In seventeen different time-space pockets, with the watery corridors before and behind them pinched shut, were great fleets of floating mountains of black metal, deck upon deck and turret upon turret bris-ding with deck-guns, bombards, and cannons. We had seen these lumbering battle barges on the horizon when Mavors had allowed us to escape. Their flags showed the circle-and-spear emblem of Mars. Laestragonians.

Not far from these barges, patrolling the time-space corridors, were slim black ships, pentaconters and triremes, skipping across the curving interdimensional waters like bolts shot from crossbows. These black ships flew banners displaying a trident. Atlanteans.