House of the Sun

26

Running full-tilt down the slope, I suddenly pulled up short as I heard a scream from behind me. I turned.

Pohaku had Akaku'akanene locked in a kind of sleeper hold, her stringy throat gripped in the crook of his left elbow. In his right hand was a small pistol, a hold-out, its muzzle held firmly to the Nene shaman's temple.

"Turn into ice, haole," the bodyguard spat.

I froze. Alana Kono had her own gun out, the ruby dot of its laser sight settled firmly on her erstwhile partner's forehead.

"Don't!" Pohaku snapped at the woman. He glanced pointedly at the hold-out pistol. "Two-way trigger, hoa, okay? I squeeze, it fires. I release, it fires. Got me?"

Ah, drek. I'd read about guns with that kind of rig. At the time I couldn't understand why anyone would want a two-way trigger. The only possible application I could think of was… well, this. A Mexican standoff where you need the ultimate dead-man trigger. Where regardless of what reflex action you take when you catch a bullet, you know your own gun's going to go off. Great.

I looked into Akaku'akanene's face from a distance of maybe ten meters. Her dark, beady eyes were calm, accepting. She had to know the thoughts that were going through my head.

Too bad, old lady, you've got a lot of jam. But there's more at stake here than one woman's life. May Goose have mercy on your soul… I shifted my grip on the assault rifle. One quick burst into Pohaku's head and trust the impact of the rounds will knock his gun hand off-line before the pistol splatters the kahuna's brains…

"Don't even think it, Montgomery!" Pohaku growled. "Look!"

I looked.

And started to sweat again. Most of the guardian spirits were still flailing about where Quinn had vanished. But two of them-big, nasty, fiery ones-had turned their attention back to us and were orbiting us slowly at a distance of fifteen meters from Akaku'akanene. Drek!

"Don't do it, Montgomery," Pohaku repeated, vocalizing the thoughts that were running through my own mind. "You shoot me, I geek her, and those things have you for dinner. You try to get down there, they'll rip you apart. You saw what they did to the troopers."

I saw, all right. I ground my teeth, and lowered my weapon.

"Put it down," Pohaku ordered. "Both of you, weapons on the ground."

Kono and I exchanged helpless glances. Neither one of us knew what the frag to do. Slowly we crouched to set our weapons down on the broken volcanic rock. "What now?" I asked.

Pohaku grinned, possibly the first time I'd seen any expression other than anger, hatred, or scorn on his face. "Now we wait, and we watch. It should be an interesting show."

No drek. I looked downhill toward the shifting, churning light. The intensity of the Dance seemed to have increased. The fan of witch-light was brighter, and the wave-fronts propagating through it seemed sharper-edged. Static discharges licked along the lower margin of the cloud-deck, strobe-lighting the scene below. In the flashes some of the boulders dotting the scree slope seemed to be moving- slowly, like cautious animals. My feverish imagination, of course.

There had to be some way out of this stand off. I just needed time to think of it. "You're Na Kama'aina, aren't you?" I said, turning back to Pohaku, more to keep him talking than because I really wanted to know the answer.

He snorted his derision. "Na Kama'aina? Pigeon-livered cowards, all of them."

"ALOHA, then," I suggested.

"Of course. Just like Ka-wena-'ula-a-Hi'iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele-ka-wahine-'ai-ho-nua."

For a moment I thought he'd lost it for some reason and had just started babbling. But then a couple of the fluid syllables clicked with something in my memory. That was Scott's name, wasn't it? The name that Scott, the chauffeur/assassin, had told me his mother had given him. (Like drek, I thought suddenly. He'd taken that name himself, just like Marky "Te Purewa" Harrop, hadn't he?)

"ALOHA, then," I echoed in agreement. I paused, my mind whirring. "So I guess you've finally convinced Na Kama'aina to go along with your anticorp plan, haven't you?" I said at last, glancing pointedly down-slope toward the Dance.

Pohaku laughed harshly. "It took them fragging long enough, too, haole. But now we're going to see some real action."

I nodded slowly. "You know I'm trying to figure a way out of this," I said after a long moment. "Why don't you just cack me now and get it over with?"

He snorted. "I take my gun off-line and she drops me." He inclined his head toward Kono.

And vice versa. I thought grimly. The only one with any real freedom of action was Akaku'akanene herself. So why wasn't the shaman doing something? Couldn't she cast some kind of spell, blow the gun out of his hand, and drop the fragger in his tracks?

Then, no, I realized. He had to have some kind of magical protection, some antispell barrier or something-maybe spell-locked to him, or even Quickened so it was part of his aura. So Akaku'akanene was as immobilized in all of this as we were.

Downslope, I could feel the waves of magic spun off by the Dance. My stomach knotted and churned; my bowels felt like they were full of ice water. Frag it, I had to do something. I had to gamble. Maybe if I dropped Pohaku-and managed not to get Akaku'akanene geeked in the process- the shaman could shield me from the guardian spirits while I made a run for the Dancers… I took a deep, energizing breath, locating my assault rifle precisely in my peripheral vision. I wouldn't have much time to do it right. I tensed…

And that's when it hurtled into my field of view. A nene-a fragging goose. Honking and flapping, it soared in from Akaku'akanene's right, seemingly straight for her head.

Pohaku reacted instinctively, bringing up an elbow to protect his face. His right elbow, the elbow of his gun hand. The hold-out pistol came off-line.

Time seemed to flick into slow-motion mode. As I dived for my assault rifle, I saw the goose as it hurtled in.

Pohaku's reaction was an instant late, and the big bird's clawed feet tore at his face. He yelled in pain and alarm, rearing back from the threat to his eyes.

And then everything seemed to happen at once. The instant the barrel of Pohaku's hold-out was away from Akaku'akanene's head, the shaman drove an elbow up and back. The bony joint sank deep into the bodyguard's throat, knocking him back and off balance. Almost simultaneously a single shot rang out as Kono-who'd had the same idea as me-drilled a round into Pohaku's ten-ring. And then the Ares HVAR was in my hands, barrel coming up, laser sighting dot tracking onto the stumbling Pohaku's torso. I clamped down on the trigger; the rifle didn't so much stutter as scream on autofire. The stream of bullets did Pohaku like a chain-saw.

And then it was over. Of the three of us, only Akaku'akanene seemed unshaken by what had just happened. She brushed at her baggy clothing as if to rid it of some offending dust. Then she looked at me with those dark, glittering eyes and said quietly, "Go."

Like frag I'll go, I almost said. Then I saw the two guardian spirits that had been circling us. They were hurtling in, almost like the goose that had already vanished back into me shadows that spawned it. Akaku'akanene must have dropped her magical shield in the excitement. Instinct brought up the assault rifle again, even though intellect told me it was useless.

Akaku'akanene had seen the spirits, too… and she was smiling. One of them shot by me so close I could feel the heat of its passage. The other made an equally close approach to Kono, who flinched away and almost capped off a reflex round into it. Both totally ignored us as they fell on the mangled body of Pohaku, gleefully completing me dismemberment my long autofire burst had begun.

As time snapped back to normal, realization went click in me back of my brain. Okay, so that was why the guardian spirits didn't leave us alone even after Akaku'akanene had told them we wanted to stop the Dance. They'd sensed that somebody in me group had wanted to protect the Dance- Pohaku, to be precise. Maybe the spirits couldn't identify just which one of us was the enemy of the pattern (perhaps the antispell barrier that had protected the gillette had confused them). Or maybe the conflict between Akaku'akanene's reasurances and their own perceptions had decided them not to take any chances and geek us all, just in case. Whatever the case, I seemed to be in the clear.

In a manner of speaking, of course.

Again, I acted before I had a chance to paralyze myself with second thoughts. I flashed Alana Kono my best frag-the-world smile, and I took off down that scree slope at a dead run, toward the Dance half a klick away.

Bad move, chummer, real bad move. I'd made it maybe 100 of those 500 meters when I put a foot wrong, turned an ankle, and did a classic one-and-a-half-gainer to land on my neck and shoulder. My injured shoulder, of course. I did what anyone would do in that situation-I screamed bloody blue murder, as I did this graceful skidding roll down the loose scree slope. After what seemed like a frag of a long time, I came to rest upside down against a car-sized boulder.

Well, okay, maybe it turned out not to be such a bad move after all. Apparently what gods there be look out for babies, drunks, and overconfident drekheads. An instant after I fetched up against the backside of that boulder, fire washed over it from the front in a great roaring, flickering sheet. I tried to curl up so tight I vanished into my own belly button as the heat-pulse washed over me, crisping my hair and tightening my skin.

It was over in less than a second, almost like the wash of a single fireball. I popped up and risked a look over the top of my smoking boulder.

I must have attracted the attention of at least one of the Dancers, that was for fragging sure. The Dance continued, but one of the loincloth-clad kahunas had pulled out and was glaring out toward me over the intervening territory. Obviously, he'd cut loose with some nasty fireball-like spell. (An unpleasant thought struck me then: Were the Dancers able to draw energy from me site of power that was Haleakala? If so, all the guidelines I'd learned about the limits on just how much juice a mage can cast without keeling over had just gone right out the window.)

Well, frag it, now he'd attracted my attention, too. I brought the HVAR to bear and hosed off a short ripping burst. (Burning the entire clip in the progress. Man, that puppy fired fast!) I didn't dunk I'd hit him-he probably had some kind of magical barrier up-but reflex made him hunker down… which is the purpose of suppression fire anyway. I ducked down into the blast-shadow of my boulder again.

Again, not a moment too soon. Something-some things, to be precise-spattered off the other side of the boulder. The impacts were hard enough to be bullets, but the sound they made weren't quite right. Shrapnel of some kind cascaded over the top and down my side of the boulder, and some went down my collar. Cold, wet… ice chips. The fragger was firing high-velocity icicles at me, or some damn thing. Then and mere I decided that yes, maybe I was a magophobe after all.

This was not going to be easy. I looked back upslope for Alana Kono. A second gun would make all the difference down here. Maybe we could each take turns giving covering fire while the other leapfrogged forward.

No luck on that score, I saw immediately. I'd been shielded from the super-fireball by my boulder. Kono hadn't been so lucky. She was down in a huddled heap, unmoving. Sullen flames licked over her body, sending a twisted totem of greasy smoke up toward the clouds. Frag it to hell…

The almost subliminal vibration-the low, cosmic thrumming-I'd felt from the rock underfoot (now underass) changed its timbre, almost as though its frequency had been kicked up an octave. My bowels knotted again, and my vision blurred as the vibration conducted through my hoop, up my spine, and into my skull. Once more I could feel the magic that was being worked 400 meters away from my boulder, sense the almost limitless power that was being harnessed. Not so many minutes ago Akaku'akanene had told me the Dancers were far along with their ritual. Now, I didn't need any shaman to tell me that the ritual was approaching its climax.

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.

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.

The grenade hit it dead center and detonated. No pussy smoke this time; the second magazine I'd grabbed were frags. I heard the almost subliminal whisper of splinters cutting through the air around me. The cairn was already blown to drek, but what the hell? I had five more grenades. 1 pumped another one into the wreckage just for good measure.

I'd breached the Dancers' protective circle. Somehow I knew that, I could feel it. And they knew it, too. They stopped in mid-convulsion and they stared-some at me, most at the gate, but all with the same expression of mind-numbed terror. They stared.

Until I cut them down with a single long, hosing burst from my HVAR. They went down like tenpins, sprawling, slumping, spraying blood and tissue. I laughed then, an irrational, insane sound in my own ears. Well, that's one way to tell the dancers from the dance…

My job wasn't done yet. I turned toward the gate, keeping my eyes averted from the rent in space, and I pumped out the four grenades remaining in the magazine. As before, I was aiming not at what was inside the protective circle, but at the circle itself. The minigrenades exploded among the white stones, ash, flour, and carved and feathered fetishes, blowing them to hell.

Something slammed into my back, driving me to the ground. Sharp lava rock slashed my face and hands. I raised my head, blood already running into my eyes and blurring my vision.

It was one of those big rock hound-things that had knocked me down. It hadn't stopped to so much as sniff me or lift a leg on me. It and a dozen or more of its fellows were hightailing it toward the gate. If before they'd moved about as nippily as a glacier, now they were making up for it. Huge, bounding strides ate up the distance.

On their heels, quite literally, came the wild tumult of guardian spirits that had been kept out by the Dancers' magical barriers. Like a wailing, screaming pack of lost souls, they flooded in above me. Not toward the gate, I saw quickly-toward what was left of the kahunas I'd cut down. As the hounds (or whatever they were) loped on toward the gate, the guardian spirits fell on the corpses and not-quite-corpses and tore them to bloody shreds, gibbering and yelping with unholy glee.

Hounds were converging on the gate from all directions.

For the first time I heard the sound they made-a hideous, unnatural baying that pierced my ears and turned my blood to ice. Onward, inward they charged. Their bulk hid from me the horror of the thing that was emerging from the gate.

I thought they'd hurl themselves headlong at the thing, like attack dogs going for an intruder's throat. No way, chummer, that would have been too predictable. They skidded to a stop, all of them, forming a solid ring around the gate. Shoulder to stone shoulder they crouched. Then, simultaneously, they raised their blocky muzzles to the sky and they howled.

It cut through me, that sound, reached deep down into my soul and touched every remnant of despair, loneliness, and abandonment I've ever felt-touched them and roused them to life again. I would have cried-would have burst into tears, never to stop again-but my soul hurt so much I couldn't cry. I thought I was dying, then. How could a pitiful human feel so much desperation and not die?

Yet somehow I didn't. Somehow, my heart kept pumping, my blood kept flowing. I lay there on the rocky ground, watching as the great hounds howled at the gate.

And it changed, the gate did. It shivered and shimmered, losing resolution. Lightning flashed and cracked, but now within the infinite depth of the gate. Actinic light strobed, throwing the hounds into sharp contrast, black on blinding white. From within the gate, something screamed, adding its own cry of despair to the howling of the hounds.

With a final sky-splitting crash, the gate collapsed in upon itself. The crystal-fire air shimmered, and I saw a shock wave-a perfectly hemispherical wave-front-spreading out from the center. As in all those old flatfilms of nuke tests, the shock wave expanded toward me, the air before it compressed to such density that it was opaque.

The shock wave touched me, and everything stopped.