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Pohaku laughed harshly. "It took them fragging long enough, too, haole. But now we're going to see some real action."

I nodded slowly. "You know I'm trying to figure a way out of this," I said after a long moment. "Why don't you just cack me now and get it over with?"

He snorted. "I take my gun off-line and she drops me." He inclined his head toward Kono.

And vice versa. I thought grimly. The only one with any real freedom of action was Akaku'akanene herself. So why wasn't the shaman doing something? Couldn't she cast some kind of spell, blow the gun out of his hand, and drop the fragger in his tracks?

Then, no, I realized. He had to have some kind of magical protection, some antispell barrier or something-maybe spell-locked to him, or even Quickened so it was part of his aura. So Akaku'akanene was as immobilized in all of this as we were.

Downslope, I could feel the waves of magic spun off by the Dance. My stomach knotted and churned; my bowels felt like they were full of ice water. Frag it, I had to do something. I had to gamble. Maybe if I dropped Pohaku-and managed not to get Akaku'akanene geeked in the process- the shaman could shield me from the guardian spirits while I made a run for the Dancers… I took a deep, energizing breath, locating my assault rifle precisely in my peripheral vision. I wouldn't have much time to do it right. I tensed…

And that's when it hurtled into my field of view. A nene-a fragging goose. Honking and flapping, it soared in from Akaku'akanene's right, seemingly straight for her head.

Pohaku reacted instinctively, bringing up an elbow to protect his face. His right elbow, the elbow of his gun hand. The hold-out pistol came off-line.

Time seemed to flick into slow-motion mode. As I dived for my assault rifle, I saw the goose as it hurtled in.

Pohaku's reaction was an instant late, and the big bird's clawed feet tore at his face. He yelled in pain and alarm, rearing back from the threat to his eyes.

And then everything seemed to happen at once. The instant the barrel of Pohaku's hold-out was away from Akaku'akanene's head, the shaman drove an elbow up and back. The bony joint sank deep into the bodyguard's throat, knocking him back and off balance. Almost simultaneously a single shot rang out as Kono-who'd had the same idea as me-drilled a round into Pohaku's ten-ring. And then the Ares HVAR was in my hands, barrel coming up, laser sighting dot tracking onto the stumbling Pohaku's torso. I clamped down on the trigger; the rifle didn't so much stutter as scream on autofire. The stream of bullets did Pohaku like a chain-saw.

And then it was over. Of the three of us, only Akaku'akanene seemed unshaken by what had just happened. She brushed at her baggy clothing as if to rid it of some offending dust. Then she looked at me with those dark, glittering eyes and said quietly, "Go."

Like frag I'll go, I almost said. Then I saw the two guardian spirits that had been circling us. They were hurtling in, almost like the goose that had already vanished back into me shadows that spawned it. Akaku'akanene must have dropped her magical shield in the excitement. Instinct brought up the assault rifle again, even though intellect told me it was useless.

Akaku'akanene had seen the spirits, too… and she was smiling. One of them shot by me so close I could feel the heat of its passage. The other made an equally close approach to Kono, who flinched away and almost capped off a reflex round into it. Both totally ignored us as they fell on the mangled body of Pohaku, gleefully completing me dismemberment my long autofire burst had begun.

As time snapped back to normal, realization went click in me back of my brain. Okay, so that was why the guardian spirits didn't leave us alone even after Akaku'akanene had told them we wanted to stop the Dance. They'd sensed that somebody in me group had wanted to protect the Dance- Pohaku, to be precise. Maybe the spirits couldn't identify just which one of us was the enemy of the pattern (perhaps the antispell barrier that had protected the gillette had confused them). Or maybe the conflict between Akaku'akanene's reasurances and their own perceptions had decided them not to take any chances and geek us all, just in case. Whatever the case, I seemed to be in the clear.

In a manner of speaking, of course.

Again, I acted before I had a chance to paralyze myself with second thoughts. I flashed Alana Kono my best frag-the-world smile, and I took off down that scree slope at a dead run, toward the Dance half a klick away.

Bad move, chummer, real bad move. I'd made it maybe 100 of those 500 meters when I put a foot wrong, turned an ankle, and did a classic one-and-a-half-gainer to land on my neck and shoulder. My injured shoulder, of course. I did what anyone would do in that situation-I screamed bloody blue murder, as I did this graceful skidding roll down the loose scree slope. After what seemed like a frag of a long time, I came to rest upside down against a car-sized boulder.

Well, okay, maybe it turned out not to be such a bad move after all. Apparently what gods there be look out for babies, drunks, and overconfident drekheads. An instant after I fetched up against the backside of that boulder, fire washed over it from the front in a great roaring, flickering sheet. I tried to curl up so tight I vanished into my own belly button as the heat-pulse washed over me, crisping my hair and tightening my skin.

It was over in less than a second, almost like the wash of a single fireball. I popped up and risked a look over the top of my smoking boulder.

I must have attracted the attention of at least one of the Dancers, that was for fragging sure. The Dance continued, but one of the loincloth-clad kahunas had pulled out and was glaring out toward me over the intervening territory. Obviously, he'd cut loose with some nasty fireball-like spell. (An unpleasant thought struck me then: Were the Dancers able to draw energy from me site of power that was Haleakala? If so, all the guidelines I'd learned about the limits on just how much juice a mage can cast without keeling over had just gone right out the window.)

Well, frag it, now he'd attracted my attention, too. I brought the HVAR to bear and hosed off a short ripping burst. (Burning the entire clip in the progress. Man, that puppy fired fast!) I didn't dunk I'd hit him-he probably had some kind of magical barrier up-but reflex made him hunker down… which is the purpose of suppression fire anyway. I ducked down into the blast-shadow of my boulder again.

Again, not a moment too soon. Something-some things, to be precise-spattered off the other side of the boulder. The impacts were hard enough to be bullets, but the sound they made weren't quite right. Shrapnel of some kind cascaded over the top and down my side of the boulder, and some went down my collar. Cold, wet… ice chips. The fragger was firing high-velocity icicles at me, or some damn thing. Then and mere I decided that yes, maybe I was a magophobe after all.

This was not going to be easy. I looked back upslope for Alana Kono. A second gun would make all the difference down here. Maybe we could each take turns giving covering fire while the other leapfrogged forward.

No luck on that score, I saw immediately. I'd been shielded from the super-fireball by my boulder. Kono hadn't been so lucky. She was down in a huddled heap, unmoving. Sullen flames licked over her body, sending a twisted totem of greasy smoke up toward the clouds. Frag it to hell…

The almost subliminal vibration-the low, cosmic thrumming-I'd felt from the rock underfoot (now underass) changed its timbre, almost as though its frequency had been kicked up an octave. My bowels knotted again, and my vision blurred as the vibration conducted through my hoop, up my spine, and into my skull. Once more I could feel the magic that was being worked 400 meters away from my boulder, sense the almost limitless power that was being harnessed. Not so many minutes ago Akaku'akanene had told me the Dancers were far along with their ritual. Now, I didn't need any shaman to tell me that the ritual was approaching its climax.