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.