House of the Sun (47 page)
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. I 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 midconvulsion 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 malang 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.
And, yet again, I came back to what we laughingly call consciousness in a hospital bed, staring blankly at a featureless white ceiling. The same damn thing over and over again ...
I took a breath and moaned aloud at the pain it caused me. I felt as if a troll with combat boots had stomped—with precise and loving care—on every important part of my anatomy,
and
several parts I wouldn't previously have classed as important. I
hurt
. All of me, all over. Deep down, and out the other side. (Except for my left arm, of course, but even it sent my brain its own weird analog of "pain" signals.)
Only
living
men
feel
pain,
I tried reassuring myself. It didn't work worth squat. Lying there hurting, I couldn't help but envy the dead.
I guess I drifted off then for a while, because the next time I was aware of my own existence the ceiling lights were out. The only illumination came from the direction of the foot of my bed. A cold, blue-white wash of light. Moonlight?
I tried sitting up, quickly giving up on that as a bad job. Instead, I had to satisfy myself with rolling my head on the pillow so I could cast a corner-eyed look down the length of my body.
Yep, moonlight. Somebody had neglected to close the shutters over my window, and I could see straight out into the night. The full moon rode high among the clouds, like a ghostly galleon sailing through an archipelago of surrealistic islands.
Full moon? I tried to remember what phase the moon had been when Gordon Ho and I had stood watching the Thor attack from the window of New Foster Tower. I found I couldn't recall details—of that night, or of just about anything else, for that matter. Some part of me knew that this
should
disturb me, but at the moment I didn't have the energy to give a frag. I was pretty sure the moon had been new or close to it even though I couldn't pin it down exactly.
Which meant I'd been out of it for
two
weeks
'? Remembering the last time I'd woken up in a hospital after a protracted unconsciousness, I quickly ran a kind of mental inventory of my body. Did anything feel strange, numb or—worse—absent?
No, I realized after a nasty moment, letting myself relax back into the bed with relief. Everything felt just about right . .. which meant it hurt like frag. If I
had
lost something and the docs had replaced it with chrome—as had happened to me the last time—they wouldn't have gone to the effort of perfectly replicating posttrauma pain, would they?
I rolled my head again for another look at the moon. Good old moon, I thought foggily. Thank whatever gods there be that
you
remain unchanged, at least. We can frag up our own world all we want, but at least we can't jack with
you
... not bad enough that we can notice it, at least.
I closed my eyes, and for some unmeasured time I listened to the soft soughing of the air-conditioning. When I opened my eyes again, it was day. I blinked, and it was night again. Like my blurring of memory, I knew that
should
have worried me, but again I couldn't generate a sense of outrage or concern. All in its own good time, thank you very much.
Again the man in the moon did his Peeping-Tom act in my window, and I listened to the sighing of the ventilation. That was all I could hear—artificial wind inside, real wind stirring the palm trees outside. No explosions, no gunfire, no screams. The gate had to be closed, then. I couldn't imagine that any night could be this peaceful if that rent in reality hadn't been sewn back up.
"The gate
is
closed."
The soft voice from somewhere to my right fragging near Stopped my heart then and there. I let out a yelp and jumped like someone had jolted me with a cattle prod. When I'd gotten my heart rate back under the five hundred mark, I turned my head to the right and scowled at the silhouette—black on deeper black—of a seated figure. "I didn't think I spoke aloud," I said accusingly.
I heard Akaku'akanene's smile, rather than saw it. "You should continue to surprise yourself, maybe, as you do others."
For a moment I mentally chewed on the twisted grammar of that statement, then I gave up. "How?" I asked.
"How much do you know of the workings of magic?" the old woman began elliptically.
I couldn't help but smile. "Do you have any elven blood?" I asked wryly.
Again I heard her smile broaden. "Why, because I answer a question with a question?"
I sighed. "Word games later," I told her. And I repeated, "How?"
"Guardians," she said simply. I waited for her to amplify, but she didn't.
"The spirits, you mean?"
"Yes, the spirits. And other guardians as well. Guardians of Haleakala, guardians of the pattern."
She had to mean the rock dogs, didn't she? I nodded. "Go on," I suggested.
"The
kahunas,
they had to keep the guardians out to unravel the pattern."
Again I waited; again, I had to prompt, "And ... ?"
I saw the silhouette shrug, as if to say, "That's it
!
"
And I guess it was. I'd wrecked the Dancers' protective circles, which let the "guardians of the pattern" in to do their thing. Simple.
"Okay," I admitted, "I scan it. But"—I gestured at my body, the bed, the hospital room—"what's wrong with me? I feel drek-kicked."
Silence for a moment, then Akaku'akanene said softly, "Do you understand the powers you were close to?" Something in her voice made my skin crawl, but I pressed on anyway. "The Dancers were closer than I was," I pointed out.
"Yes. Shielded by protective wards. Skilled in the working of magic. You?" She snorted. "You are lucky Nene watches over you."
"What would it have done to me?" I didn't really want to know, but I had to ask. "Killed me?"
"Worse," she said, her voice a chill whisper. "Much worse."
I lay back and stared at the ceiling. I blinked. After a few moments a memory jarred me. "Hey," I said, "what was that drek with Pohaku—that goose
ex
machina!"
I didn't look at her, but still I felt her smile. "When the spirit sings, the shaman answers," she said softly. "But sometimes it is the
shaman
who sings."
Typical
spiritual
mumbo
jumbo,
is what I didn't say. I blinked ...
And it was day again, and Akaku'akanene was gone. I never saw the old goose again.
* * *
Maybe it was the old shaman's visit, or maybe it was my own indomitable strength of will (yeah, right). But after that my rate of improvement increased drastically. Within two days of Akaku'akanene's nocturnal admissions, I was on my feet and taking mild exercise, and two days after that I was rolling toward the main door of the hospital—the Kuakini Central, I'd learned its name was—in a powered wheelchair. (Why do hospitals, even in this day and age, insist that patients can't leave the premises under their own power? In case other prospective "clients" think they're actually cured ...?) My escort—the practical nurse assigned to my rehabilitation, a big, jovial ork called Mary Ann—pressed the Door Open button for me and stood clear as I rolled out into the sunshine. She bent down and planted a wet, tusked kiss on the top of my head. (We'd gotten along just fine, me and Mary Ann—when she wasn't threatening me into one more rep on some exercise-torture machine, that was.)
