House of the Sun (46 page)

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 minigrenade 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 the 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 the 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, there 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.

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 the 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 unscathed? 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 headdress, 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 throne room of the 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 the 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
kahuna'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 ...