And though the nearly invisible substance of the things warped the glaring sunlight like rippling lenses when they all crowded in around the two women, forcing Diana to squint and bob her head to guess exactly in which direction the water lay, she was able to push the things aside as easily as if they had been big soft-skinned helium balloons.
Their yielding skins were cold to the touch, and Diana's hands were becoming achingly numb even as the sun beat down on her head and face.
At one point the giant transparency that was the Circus Circus clown dropped one ludicrously big foot right over her, and she had a moment of fishbowl vision and felt as though she had been bathed in a shower of menthol.
"Straight ahead, I think," she gasped when it had lifted and freed her. "This isn't so bad, you know?"
Dinh had been keeping the things away from herself with the sweeping edge of the chip. "They're getting tougher to cut, though," she gasped. A moment later she added, "Especially the ones you've touched."
Diana realized that she was tired—sweating and breathing through her slackly open mouth—even though she was hardly doing anything more strenuous than walking slowly across the hot sand; and when she glanced around her at the crystal shapes she had pushed out of her way, it seemed to her that those ones were more substantial and were visibly tinted pink, faintly filtering the colors of the sand and the distant water.
Every one of the figures, in fact, looked solider.
Suddenly she was cold all over again, but from fear now, and she crowded in close to Nardie's back. "God, Nardie," she said tightly, "I think they've been draining me here, somehow, when I was pushing them out of the way, like eating me. Keep 'em off with the chip; I'm not touching them anymore."
"We got to get to the water."
Diana ducked and scampered away from a dwarfish crystal cowboy with long, flailing arms. "Soon," she panted in agreement. The air was sour with a smell like broken old bones.
"How come they would"—Nardie swiped at a grinning transparent Arab—"want to eat you, eat us?"
"Maybe so we'd—take their shapes. Absorb us before we get to the water, while we're still not—unpalatable, inedible."
Diana was sure she could see some of her own lost substance in the phantoms; their arms whistled through the air now, and their feet made indentations in the sand.
They had weight now.
Twice the giant Circus Circus clown had nearly stomped them before Nardie had danced in and cut its ankle; one towering leg was now emptied and gone, but the clown was hopping from one dune to another on its remaining leg, substantial enough to kick up real, stinging clouds of sand, and it seemed more likely than before to land a Volkswagen-size foot on them. And it looked as if it would be a pile driver blow now, not a menthol shower.
The glassy pink figures were crowding up from the lakeside. Diana and Nardie were being slowly driven back, toward the highway.
And now suddenly the figures had something like fingernails; twice Diana had narrowly ducked away from one of them, and her upflung arm had been raked by something that stung and raised blisters.
Worse even than the very real possibility of physical death was Diana's conviction that the things were capable of more, that they could somehow consume her and Nardie, render the two of them down into some basic psychic stuff that would fill their multitudinous, presently empty shapes.
And then Nardie and Diana would be no more than unaware ghosts in the mannequins and effigies scattered all over the city, no longer any kind of threat to the King—just semi-sentient sacrifices to unknowable chaotic gods.
Diana kept one hand on Dinh's shoulder, and together they darted and retreated and advanced, step by step diagonally closer to the water, moving toward it in a slant to keep the two giants hedged back by the more normal-size figures.
Nardie's hand snaked out again, and a grinning two-dimensional figure in the apron of a dealer tore apart silently into translucent splinters.
"Good," said Diana tensely, "we're nearly there."
"But it's using up our chip," panted Nardie as she cut one of the Caesars Palace Romans. "Look." In the instant before Dinh swung the edge again toward one of the legs of the giant clown, making the shimmering figure hop mindlessly back, Diana had seen that the Moulin Rouge chip was thinned down to no more than coin-thickness now and was white as a bone.
"The sword the turtle gave us," Nardie said through clenched teeth, "is wearing out."
The wind was strong on the highway on top of the dam. Mavranos thought he could hear weeping and laughter on the wind but then realized that the sounds were in his head, resonating from the minds of the tourists who were rushing in all directions to get away from the induced madness.
A man in a white leather jacket was leaning over the lakeside rail not far from Mavranos, waving one hand out over the long drop to the water. Mavranos saw blood on the man's hand and realized that this must be Ray-Joe Pogue.
Security guards were out on the highway directing traffic, having to shout over the wind at the drivers, who were simply intent on getting away. Even as Mavranos watched, one of the guards tossed his hat away and began running down the middle of the highway toward the distant Nevada side of the dam.
Mavranos wanted to get back down out of these mountains to the plains. This was much too high up—the sun, which was glinting so blindingly in the chrome of the rushing cars, seemed too close overhead, and the gunning of the engines didn't seem as loud as it should have, as if the air up here were less able to carry sound.
Pogue is doing this, he told himself, having to think loudly over the shouting and weeping in his head. He's shaking his blood into the lake, and somehow he's got a psychic chain reaction going here—all the minds of these people are echoing and reechoing insanity.
If I can knock him out …
He could feel a whimper starting up in his throat, and he wondered how long he could hold on to his purpose in the battering of the induced passions.
Or kill him, he thought.
Veils of pink fog spun in the wind. Mavranos stepped to the rail and looked down toward the water, and he saw that the wisps of fog were bursting into existence in the air below where Pogue leaned out over the parapet. The drops of his blood were apparently exploding into steam before they reached the water.
He hadn't yet succeeded in poisoning the lake.
Mavranos summoned all his remaining strength in order to take the last few strides along the walk and approach Pogue. He tried to smile like someone about to ask for directions or a match, and he shoved one hand in his jeans pocket to keep his untucked shirttail from flipping up in the breeze and exposing the walnut grip of the .38 tucked into his belt.
Pogue's jacket was blindingly white, and glittering rhinestones on the high collar sent needles of rainbow light into Mavranos's squinting eyes. Pogue was wearing a red baseball cap on the sculptured perfection of his pompadour, and when he turned toward Mavranos, glaring out of two blackened eyes past the white bandage on his nose, Mavranos saw the oversize card tucked into the band.
It was the Tower card from a Lombardy Zeroth Tarot deck, and the picture of the lightning striking the Babel-like tower and the two men falling struck Mavranos's mind like a blow.
He staggered back and looked away, forcing himself not to simply surrender to the violation of his mind by the potent symbol. This must have been what was causing the mental racket—every tourist who had looked squarely at the card, breathing the steam of Pogue's blood, would have got the psychic equivalent of a shock treatment, and even the ones who couldn't have seen it were nevertheless in the fog and picking up the signal and stepping it up and re-broadcasting it.