Quentin, in the background, softly: "Colin can find her. She still owes him a favor."
I should have run back into the store, but the fact that streamers of obligation-energy were reaching from Deimos to this area frightened me irrationally. This store was part of a trap. Vanity was not in it, anyway.
I ran from the alley to the street. It was bright and crowded for a nighttime street, and the night air was warm.
People were staring at me, so I slowed down to a brisk trot. Just a lady in a leather jacket and cap, out for a walk with her space-age guitar! Everything is normal!
As I continued to walk, I noticed that everything did look normal. Whatever alarm I had just set off, it might be weeks or years before ap Cymru answered. Maybe I was safe for now.
I pulled the phone from my pocket and held it up to my ear. "Vanity! I'm in the main street in front of the shop. There are people all around me, humans. If we're right about the gods, they will not show themselves in front of a crowd. I am making my way West on..."
That was when I noticed the phone was dead. There was no click of disconnection, no hum of the power shutting off, just... silence.
"Vanity? Hello...?"
All the bright, noisy cars moving from light to light along the street now slowed and halted. Radio music banging from the nearer cars squawked and stopped.
The pedestrians, wherever they were, beneath the neon signs at the bus stops, in the middle of the crosswalk, on the sidewalks, fell, or slumped, or keeled over.
Blackness rushed across the cityscape as lights from the building across the way went out. The streetlamps turned dark. A thousand teeny tiny machine noises, radios, the hissing of the portable popcorn popper of a late-night street vendor, the whirr of distant automatic doors opening and closing, the hum from refrigerators, elevators, other motors... all muttered and fell into a deep, tomblike hush.
The clock on the bell tower of the bank across the street from my position emitted one last peal, and then stopped, its second hand frozen. The electronic sign turned all white as all the bulbs lit up, and then went black.
I felt a pressure in the sleep centers of my brain, activity in my pons attempting to trigger narcolepsy, changes in my medulla oblongata trying to switch my brain-wave pattern from alpha-beta consciousness to delta-wave dream state.
If my brain continued to obey the laws of nature, I would have to sleep, and immediately.
I jumped into another dimension.
I was through and "past" the stone surface of the building in front of me in a moment. I saw the cubicles and interior spaces of the building, the pipes beneath the street, the interstices between the walls, all laid out like a flat blueprint. I saw the various textures of internal natures: greedy billboards, generous water pipes, frowning walls, ambitious electrical generators, patient power lines.
At this point I was some nine hundred feet above the street, and about forty feet or so in the
"blue" direction of overspace, not so far away from the plane of Earth's home continuum that I could not see it, albeit everything was now made soft and mysterious by a haze of blue, a Doppler shift created by the curving metric.
Through the blue haze, I could see other planes of other continua around me, to my left and right, up and down, before me, behind me, and blue and red of me. Only then did I notice what was odd about this four-space. Unlike the street level, it was lit. It was much brighter here than the analogous four-space "above" England. I was seeing farther than I ever had before.
I looked "above" and "behind" me for the source of the light.
The light (actually, volumes of an energy for which we have no name) was coming from (issuing in concentric hyperspheres) a curving bubble or blister in a nearby continuum. This continuum was in a plane parallel to Earth's continuum. It lay about a hundred yards in the "blue" direction, and had formed this reddish blister on its hypersurface, which was swelling and shimmering. The sight reminded me of a steel door being melted, as if the metal were expanding and about to explode outward---
The sight made me feel, despite that I was in the freedom of hyperspace, claustrophobic.
In that gushing light, I could see that the hyperspace was swarming with traffic. In seventeen different time-space pockets, with the watery corridors before and behind them pinched shut, were great fleets of floating mountains of black metal, deck upon deck and turret upon turret bris-ding with deck-guns, bombards, and cannons. We had seen these lumbering battle barges on the horizon when Mavors had allowed us to escape. Their flags showed the circle-and-spear emblem of Mars. Laestragonians.
Not far from these barges, patrolling the time-space corridors, were slim black ships, pentaconters and triremes, skipping across the curving interdimensional waters like bolts shot from crossbows. These black ships flew banners displaying a trident. Atlanteans.
Hanging in little time-space pockets of their own were huge machines shaped like suits of armor, half a mile or more from crown to spurs. The hulls of the machines were blazing with silver and gold, brightly enameled and decorated with delicate bas-relief. Spears or war-hammers the size of aircraft carriers rested at the sides of the metal warlords. I gazed "past" their armored hulls at their interior clockworks, engines, amplifiers, linkages; I saw alchemical hearts of white fire burning in glass vessels. I saw pistons the size of the Empire State Building. Tubes charged with atomic energy, like veins from the heart of the sun, ran down the core of each suit, from shoulder to heel.
The massive visors of the machines were being cranked open. Their lantern-eyes were being lit by attendants, who stood on ladders clamped to the cheek-plates, and reached carefully upward with long poles tipped with fire. Their symbol was a crane in flight. Mulciber's people.
I was used to hyperspace being empty, my own private playground. Here it was seething with a hornet's nest of ships and men and armaments, the crossroads of hundreds of pathways through time-space. A port city for the traffic of the gods. And it was under guard. Archer's place had been in one of the few dark corners of this multidimensional edifice.