But it wasn't the sky of this world. And there were things_ moving in it.
I thought I was going mad.
My time sense pulled another shift on me, and suddenly I was plunging at full sprint through the thinning smoke cloud. I kept my legs driving, but I brought up the barrel of the HVAR.
There was the shaman, right in front of me. He'd moved forward since I'd last seen him, right up to the edge of his magical antiprojectile barrier. Bad move. A freak gust of wind had blown the smoke back toward him, engulfing him. In the instant before I plowed full-on into him, I saw his eyes-puffy, red, watering-bug wide open. He opened his mouth-maybe to cast a spell, maybe to yell "fuck," I'd never know.
My shoulder went into his lower chest-my injured shoulder, frag it all-and I bowled him clean off his feet. As he went over backward, I stroked him reflexively across the side of the headbone with the empty grenade-pistol. And then-insult to injury-I blew his guts wide open with a burst from me HVAR as I staggered on.
The circling, churning mass of guardian spirits was behind me. That meant I was inside the magical barrier that was keeping them from getting to the Dancers. I was also through the antiprojectile barrier the downed kahuna had put up to protect himself. That meant…
I think I grinned as I slapped new magazines into both the HVAR and the grenade-pistol.
There were the Dancers, twenty-five meters away from me, no more. If they even knew I was there, they couldn't divert one iota of attention from what they were doing. For the first time I saw the patterns traced out on the ground- sketched with ash or flour, and with white rocks arranged in complex shapes, dotted throughout with wood, bone, and feather fetishers-and I understood a little better what was going on.
The Dancers themselves were within something that had to be a protective pattern of some kind, a circle twenty-five meters in diameter circumscribing their movements. And then, offset from the Dance, was another protective circle- smaller, but much more complex'… and, I sensed somehow, much more powerful. The crystal-fire air, the region of darkness, the "stars," the things-they were all within that second circle.
So what did that mean? Circles can keep things in, or they can keep things out-that's about the extent of my understanding of conjuring. The smaller, more complex circle had to be intended to bind bug-boy's "entities" when they came through what I'd started thinking of as the "gate"-the rent the Dance had made in reality. (And, if I was to take bug-boy's and Akaku'akanene's warnings at face value, it wouldn't be enough to do the job.)
What of the circle around the Dancers, then? There was nothing to keep in, so it must serve to keep something out. A kind of magical bullet-proof vest-coverage for the shamans, in case the entities that came through managed to defeat the circle intended to constrain them.
Well, fuck that noise, that's what I say.
The entities weren't coming through the rip in reality, but they would come. I was convinced of that. The Dancers had opened a portal, a fistula, between our world and another. The damage was done. Any moment, one or more of bug-boy's entities-my "cosmic nasties"-would slither or leap or bound through that gap, and then the drek would drop into the pot. The islands of Hawai'i would suffer the torments of hell…
So were the Dancers-the slots who'd brought this whole drekky situation about-going to get away unseamed? Were they going to stay, safe and secure, inside their protective circle, while the cosmic nasties headed off on their rampage?
Not if I had anything to fragging say about it, chummer, let me tell you that.
I felt my lips pull back from my teeth in a terrible smile as I brought up both my weapons, bringing them to bear on the Dancers. Grenade first, just to let them know that hell was coming for them. My right finger tightened on the trigger…
And every fragging muscle in my body froze. Every one. My breath was stilled, I think my heart stopped. Just as before, on the tarmac at Kaiao Field, I was magically paralyzed.
God damn you, Harlech! I tried to scream, but the words were confined to my own mind.
At my left side a figure appeared. Just appeared-one moment nothing, the next moment there, blink, just like that. Not Quinn Harlech. A Polynesian man, wearing the same uniform as the other Dancers-loincloth, woven-grass head¬dress, and that was it. Except for a nasty smile.
I knew him, the fragger. I'd seen him before, wearing more or less the same retro-drek. Standing at the left hand of King Kamehameha V in the dirone room of me Iolani Palace. I knew that scrawny, withered, nut-brown body, now glistening with sweat. King Kamehameha's kahuna, his magical advisor. Did Gordon Ho know how close to him the treachery had been? Well, if he didn't, it was a fragging cinch I wouldn't be telling him.
The world was already starting to tunnel down around me as my brain cried out for the oxygen my heart wasn't sending it. What a fragging lousy way to go: this close, and then stopped in my tracks by an old rat-frag of a shaman, who just hung out invisibly until I wandered into his little ambush. What a drekky way out, asphyxiating with all my muscles frozen…
Muscles? How did this magic drek work, anyway? Did it block the motor nerves, or did it freeze the muscles themselves? Only one way to find out. And hell, it had worked in an ancient book I'd read once…
With my left arm-my cybernetic replacement arm-I lashed out with all me boosted strength of pseudomyomer fibers, servo-motors, and cyber-actuators. Not a muscle moved-just the technological replacement for muscles.
My left hand, and the assault rifle it was holding, moved so quickly it was blur. The barrel smashed into the old ka¬huna's throat with a horrible crunching sound, still accelerating out and up. And fragged if it didn't tear his goddamned head clean off! The kahuna's body went one way, his head went another, and my own body went a third, flung off its feet by the violence of my motion. I hit the ground hard, driving from my lungs what little stale air they still contained. I gasped in an agonizing breath…
Repeat that. I gasped in agonizing breath! The pain I felt was like a benediction. Only living men feel pain.
As the kahuna had died, so had his spell. I was free again. I could breathe, I could move.
For a few long seconds I lay there, relishing-wallowing in-the sensations of breathing. Then a sudden change in the vibration humming through the ground reminded me that my only chance of continuing to breathe-and slim chance it was-lay in my own hands. With a snarl, I forced myself up to my hands and knees, then to an unsteady crouch.
The Dance had reached its frenetic crescendo. Two of the Dancers seemed to be down-fainted or dead, I had no way of telling-but the others were still leaping around as if they were having convulsions. Fifty meters away, at ground zero, the rent in the fabric of… well, of everything… had opened wider. I could feel cold radiating onto my face. (Okay, I know cold doesn't radiate. But frag it, that's precisely how it felt…) Something filled the gate, started to emerge through it.
Something…
I forced myself to look away. My God… My brain couldn't comprehend what my eyes had seen… not quite. I was right on the terrible brink of comprehension, and I had the unshakable conviction that if I ever did comprehend, then in that instant I'd go incurably insane.
I didn't have to look at ground zero, anyway. My real targets were much closer than that.
I brought the grenade-pistol to bear, aiming carefully over the open sights. The circle surrounding the Dancers was divided into quadrants by small but elaborate cairns built out of white stones, carved wooden sculptures, and chunks of bone. The nearest of the four cairns was less than thirty meters away from me. I checked my aim and squeezed the trigger.