A hail of spears and darts came; all were deflected or fell harmlessly. The giant, whom Hunt had mentally dubbed Agamemnon, advanced menacingly, drawing his sword. Reassured that God was indeed on his side, Hunt stepped forward with a new feeling of confidence to meet him.
“Die, puppet of pretenders!” Agamemnon cried, swinging.
“Not today, I think, thank you,” Hunt said, and snapped his fingers. The sword turned into a vine of pink flowers, which coiled itself around Agamemnon’s arm. Agamemnon stopped, staring at the flowers in confusion, then shook them off and stamped on them.
“Getting the hang of it now,” VISAR said.
“Yes, well, do you think you could remove this chap to a safer distance?”
“No problem.” An invisible force swept Agamemnon unceremoniously across the platform and over the edge. He hit the ground with a mighty, metallic crash and sat up, dazed and bewildered.
“The others are a bit too close for comfort, too,” Hunt said. Agamemnon had just started to pick himself up when the rest of the soldiers who had been up on the platform cascaded down on top of him.
“How’s that?”
“Not bad.”
The bearded man below, who had spoken of himself in Hunt’s mind as Shingen-Hu, was pointing up at him and calling out to the crowd. “Behold the angel that was foretold! See how the servants of treachery are powerless before him!”
“How do we know what they’re saying?” Hunt asked VISAR. “You can’t be translating. You’re new here, as well.”
“Your thought patterns are coupled to an Ent-wired neural system that includes a local speech center. It’s the same as the reason why Ents can understand Jevlenese when they emerge.”
Deprived of his soldiers, the noble was cringing back among the executioner and his minions for protection. Hunt turned the knives they were holding into cucumbers and their jerkins into coats of thick molasses, then collided them all together so that they fell, writhing and adhering helplessly. Starting to enjoy himself, he turned the chains of the three unfortunates tied to the stakes into garlands of butterflies, which dispersed and fluttered away.
“So these people would be able to understand me?” he asked VISAR.
“They should.”
“How much more can you give me in the way of background data?”
“Not a lot. I’m mainly manipulating physical data patterns. It needs processing through a nervous system to interpret what they mean.”
“We need Nixie here, then.”
She appeared beside Hunt, wearing a Greek chiton turned up and held by a girdle to form a short tunic falling to just above the knee; she was shod with laced buckskin. She looked like representations of Artemis, the virgin huntress. Hunt couldn’t help smiling at VISAR’s appalling choice. A murmur went up from the crowd.
“Another angel descends! My words shall be vindicated!” Shingen-Hu cried out. The crowd was impressed, clearly; but from what Hunt could see, not as much as he would have expected. Below the platform, the main body of soldiers had shown some initial confusion, but was steadying again as the occupants of the carriage came tumbling out.
“What can you make of this?” he murmured as Nixie took in the scene. “We’ve got gentry down there with the troops, and a chain gang over there. Good guys, bad guys, which are which? What’s going on?”
“The ones getting out from the carriage are priests from the city,” Nixie said. “Their logo has a green crescent, the sign of Vandros. Eubeleus uses the same sign, so they must be his buddies here.” She surveyed the results of Hunt’s impromptu handiwork. “It looks as if you got it right."
“I don’t like the kind of party this was about to be.” So saying, Hunt turned the weapons of the remaining soldiers below into a kitchen-garden variety and the chains of the prisoners into laurel leaves. The prisoners scattered them to the ground and lifted their hands, gaping down at themselves and at each other, wondering at their sudden freedom.
“See how the angels come as instruments of retribution and justice!” Shingen-Hu bellowed.
But the priests, undeterred, raised their arms in unison and pointed up toward the platform, their eyes burning in a strange, penetrating fixation that Hunt found instantly unnerving, even at that distance. And then he realized that he was paralyzed. Bolts of fire flew up at him, but VISAR interceded and dissipated them into clouds of sparks. A shimmering curtain seemed to pass between Hunt and the priests, and he found his faculties unfrozen again.
“What the hell was that, VISAR?” he gasped inwardly.
“They got to you. More goes on in this place than is obvious.”
“Well, we can match that act.” Hunt turned and pointed a finger at one of the three piles of fagots heaped around the stakes-the intended victims had made themselves scarce. “Fire.” The pile ignited into a spectacular blaze. A murmur went up from the crowd. Hunt turned back, folded his arms grandiosely, and gazed down at the priests with what he hoped was a look of lordly contempt.
It didn’t faze them. “Pah! Is that the power of your superior gods?” one of them scoffed. “Apprentice angel!” He stepped forward, pointed at the second pile, and duplicated the act. The crowd cheered. Clearly they were rooting for the home team.
“Try this,” Hunt invited, and materialized a white dove out of nowhere, flying above the crowd.
“Puerile.” The priest shot it down with a well-aimed digit of psychic flak. Hunt turned the third pile and its stake into a rosebush surmounted by an apple tree. The priests shredded the lot with an invisible blender. Hunt collapsed the carriage that they had just climbed out of into a heap of parts. They did the same to the platform that he was standing on, and only the speedy intervention of VISAR again saved him and Nixie from joining Agamemnon and his companions, who were still sorting themselves out on the ground.
“They are demons summoned by the false prophets,” the dignitary who seemed to be in charge called to the soldiers. “Slay the heretics.” The soldiers threw aside the horticultural assortment that they were holding and grabbed staffs and clubs proffered by the crowd.
“VISAR, this isn’t working,” Hunt said in a worried voice. “We need something more spectacular.”
“I could take the whole world apart, but what would it leave you to achieve? You’re supposed to be the expert on organic psychology.”
“Bring in the technical consultant.”
Porthik Eesyan appeared alongside Hunt and Nixie, who were standing before the wreckage of the platform and the burning wood. He looked like his Thurien self, but VISAR had arrayed him in ancient Egyptian fashion, with a close-fitting, skirted costume and high, rearward-projecting headpiece that suited the elongated Ganymean skull. Hunt assumed that he would have been following the events in the same way that Hunt himself had, before his abrupt debut onstage.
“Already the demons are in need of help,” the head priest sneered.
“An interesting predicament,” Eesyan observed to Hunt.
“Save the analysis till later. What do we do about it?”
“You’re going about it the wrong way. Magic is normal here. What you’re doing is impossible, but the people haven’t realized it. To them it’s just a question of degree, not really all that different: the same kind of thing that they’re used to.”
“What would you do, then?”
Eesyan addressed VISAR. “How absolute are the constraints imposed by breakdown of dimensional invariance with velocity?”
“The underlying dynamic of the substrate is optimized to preserve form,” VISAR replied. “The algorithm uses a write-before-erase protocol to afford a redundancy check for accuracy.”
“So a local violation is possible?”
“Sure. I can change the algorithm.”
Then Hunt became aware of Danchekker’s voice speaking inside his head, observing via a coupler on Jevlen and presumably being relayed for Hunt’s benefit, courtesy of VISAR. “I, ah, believe I know just the thing. VISAR, look up your records of Earth for places like Blackpool and Coney Island, would you-you know the kinds of things I mean? I think we could use as elaborate a model as you can devise, with ample gadgetry and mechanisms. They don’t have to do anything functional.”