Titans of Chaos

It covered him up. Victor was somewhere in that mess, half-buried, half-visible, and his body, halfliquid itself, stretched and stretched as his head and torso slid down the deck slope, trailing therunny goop of his torso behind him.

Something must have seen my jump up into hyperspace; wefts of siren-music, spinning along morethan one axis, ricocheted through the area, whirling like buzz saws.

The shots mostly went wild. The sirens were at extreme range, and the music faded into and out ofaudibility.

One or two stray notes struck me. I lost sensation in upper and lower parts of my body, and jerkedback into a three-dimensional shape. There was blood on my left arm and leg, the pointsanalogous to the wings and tail that had been sliced.

The numbness was only momentary; with an inching, ant-crawling sensation, little ice picks ofpain began to play along the nerves of my wounds.

The snap of music knocked me backwards across the deck. My upper senses showed me only palenoise and flashes. I was lying on my back, staring up at our blackened mast. The sails wereburning.

"Someone help Victor!" I screamed. My voice was very loud. Instead of trying to outshout astorm, I was yelling over the soft noise of cherry blossom petals in the breeze.

I tried to get to my feet. There was blood on my hands.

My blood. My forehead was bleeding. I was on one knee, my other foot braced against the crazilytilted railing, too dizzy to stand further.

Phobetor scuttled, half-bent, across the tilted deck, bending his upper leg and stretching his lower,reaching down to support himself with one hand. The orb and scepter he had been carrying weregone.

Odd. He had been striding across the storm-tossed deck as if it had been a flat carpet; now hecould barely walk on a slope. What did it mean?

Behind him, I saw a cloud smother the horizon.

This cloud of mist billowed with alarming speed up the sky beyond the cherry trees. In the space oftime it takes a man to draw a deep breath, it had blotted out half the sky. It formed a graypyramid, and began to part.

Behind it, there was a mountain. The mountain had not been there before: Yet now here it was,appearing from behind an unrolling curtain of mist. Something in the way the mist openedreminded me of a curtain.

No. Not a curtain. A door. A trapdoor.

This was Phaeacian magic. I could see another plane bending in from another segment ofdream-space, intersecting with this area. The Phaeacian had folded space.