I had to do something, and I had to do it right fragging now! What was it both Akaku'akanene and bug-boy had told me? That I was woven into this all-fired important pattern they were yammering about? And that I had influence, that events would revolve around me (or some such drek)? Well, now was the time to check out if they were telling the truth or feeding me a line of kanike.
Crouching there, with my back against a fire-scorched and ice-spattered boulder, I took the HVAR in my left hand, settling the stock up against my ribs under my arm. In my right, I took the grenade-pistol I'd requisitioned from my dead benefactor aboard the Merlin. (Daisho, I thought, suddenly recalling my friend Argent. He'd have approved of my weapon load-out, I realized. Put the autofire weapon-the one that can hose down an area in a hurry-in the off hand, the one with which you have less accuracy. Let the enhanced strength of the cyberlimb handle the recoil. Put the single-shot weapon in the hand I normally shoot with.)
I forced those thoughts aside. They were just ways my brain was trying to put off the moment when it might get itself blown to bits. I made sure both weapons were loaded and locked, safeties off. And I burst from cover like a pop-up target on a combat range.
The kahuna was waiting for me. The moment I came up and around my rock, he started a kind of shuffling dance, and I could see a nimbus of power building up around him. With the same supernatural clarity of vision I'd enjoyed earlier, I saw him smile nastily, baring his teeth.
Well, let him chew on this. I cut loose with a grenade from the pistol launcher, shooting from the hip. The recoil was grotesque, and the thing that had already gone gruntch in my shoulder definitely made its presence known. Even with that much kick the mini-grenade flew slowly enough that I could track its trajectory, could see it arcing down under the effects of gravity. The shot was going to fall short, but the concussion and splinters might still give the shaman something to think about other than geeking me.
The grenade did fall short. Or, at least, it would have if it hadn't struck some invisible barrier between me and the shaman, about five meters in front of my loinclothed antagonist. The grenade detonated, filling the area with a cloud of thick, viscous smoke. Ah, frag… I almost threw the launcher aside in terminal frustration. I'd picked up a weapon loaded with a full clip of fragging smoke grenades! If I thought I was going to live more than a few seconds more, I'd probably have felt humiliation for my stupidity. I hadn't even checked the fragging load!
What was that old joke? Death's better than failure, because you have to live with failure. Odds were, I wouldn't be having that problem. I cut loose with a short burst from the HVAR as I sprinted forward, knowing the bullets would deflect off the same invisible barrier that had stopped the grenade. But what other fragging choice did I have? Just stand there and wait for the shaman's spell to lash out through the thick cloud of smoke and smite me dead?
Wait one fragging tick… Through the thick cloud of smoke?
That's when it hit me. I couldn't see the shaman for the smoke. And if I couldn't see him, he couldn't see me. And- last step in the logical progression that might just save my sorry hoop-magic works on line-of-sight. You can't zap what you can't see…
I think I whooped with a terrible kind of glee as I brought the grenade-pistol up again and continued pumping round after round into the invisible barrier in front of the kahuna until the weapon clicked empty. The shaman caught on quickly to what I was doing. A witch-wind whipped up out of nowhere, lashing across the jagged rocks. But smoke grenades don't just burst in a cloud of smoke and that's it. No, they continue to pour the stuff out for some few seconds after they've detonated. The shaman's tame wind might blow away the smoke that was already there, but half a dozen grenades were lying on the ground between him and me, still gouting great viscous clouds of the stuff.
While I was pumping the grenade-pistol empty, I was still making my best time across the open space, my long legs eating up the distance. I kept my main focus on the smoke cloud-and, indirectly, the doubtless-pissed kahuna behind it-but I couldn't help but notice what was going on around me.
Which was, to my unschooled mind, a close approximation of Hell preparing to break loose in a big way. The tempo of the Dance had picked up, from that of a stately gavotte to something that looked like a chip-head jiving to shag rock while suffering from Saint Vitus' dance. The Dancers were moving counterclockwise in a circle twenty meters in diameter. Around them the air shimmered with power, as though each molecule burned with its own faint witch-light.
As I ran, still I managed to note for the first time that the pyrotechnic effects weren't centered on the Dancers' circle, as I'd assumed. No, not by a good margin. The fire-fan-the plume of light and infrared I'd first spotted on the Merlin's FLIR display-originated from a spot offset from the Dance's center by a good fifty meters. There was the real center of the power. The Dancers were within the margins of its nimbus, but the real ground zero (as it were) was outside the circle.
It was there-at that "ground zero"-that the really freaky things were happening. There, the air glowed with such intensity-not brilliance, as such, but intensity… and there is a difference-that it could almost have been solid: gases chilled to the point where they crystallized, and then the resulting crystal lit from within. Above ground zero the roiling, turbulent cloud deck bulged downward, as though the center of the glow were a partial vacuum, drawing air and clouds into itself. Static discharges lashed from point to point within the cloud deck, and from the clouds to the ground. They flashed through and among the dozens of guardian spirits that still swirled in their approach-avoidance display around the Dance and around ground zero itself. My ears were filled with the howling and wailing and gibbering of those spirits, with the titanic whipcracks of me static discharges, with the low-pitched, fundamental thrumming that conducted itself as well through the rocks as it did through the air.
Bright though the light ahead was, the static discharges were infinitely brighter still. Each time they flashed, they froze movement in the crater like the strobe light of a photographer. They froze my limbs, they froze the pattern of the drifting smoke, they froze the motions of the Dancers…
And they froze the motions of the boulders around me. For the boulders were moving-slowly, lumberingly. I couldn't spare them any attention, but my peripheral vision did pick up details. They had been boulders, I knew that. But-and here was one detail-they didn't look like inanimate rocks anymore. No, they looked like great beasts-like titanic hounds, crossed with the rocks of the earth in some kind of unholy breeding experiment. I could feel their eyes on me sometimes, and I felt the intensity of their hatred. Yet I could also feel that the hatred wasn't directed at me. I was irrelevant to them, I knew, just another feature of their environment, like me crashed Merlin or the clouds overhead. All of their attention was focused on the Dance, and on the crystal-fire air at ground zero. Slowly, they moved, but inexorably. They'd reach their goal sometime-I knew that, deep in my gut. What would they do when they got there? You got me, chummer.
And would they make it in time?
Time was again flowing like summer-weight oil in a deep freeze. I was hauling hoop over the broken rock. I'd already covered more than four hundred meters, leaving me maybe fifty more before I hit the smoke cloud. I was running as fast as I'd ever run in my life.
But I still had time and attention to spare to see that something had changed at ground zero. Something was there, in the midst of the crystal-fire air.
Or, more precisely, something wasn't there. If the crystal-fire air were a cloud deck, I'd say the clouds had parted to show the black sky beyond, dotted with stars. Except that the lights I could see, mere in the center of the crystal-fire air, weren't stars-stars don't shift and blink like that. And the darkness-it had the infinite sense of depth that you see in the night sky, but I knew, knew, it was bounded with the crystal-fire. Maybe I was looking into the infinite depths of a sky, I thought suddenly.