Titans of Chaos

The swift god said, "Ah, fair girl of Phaeacia, your race alone some power has that mightconfound Olympians in wrath. But I am mayhap more than mere Olympian. I have glanced allunafraid into the Chaos of Old Night; and Sable-vested Night stared back, not without love, onme; and so I know her secret lore, her occult craft and all-dissolving alchemy. I know how tounmake the boundaries of creation, and bash down the walls of time; the walls wherein yourratlike people gnaw their ratlike paths."

The green grass in which the ship lay broken now all rippled, as if the land were a banner shakinginto waves. The ground burst into confusion, while little hills of mud and snow and burning lavabroke through the earth and shot up to every side. The cherry trees and all the little landscapewere suddenly convulsed with whirlwinds of sticky mess.

The green stone in Vanity's hand flickered and lost its color. The gap of fourth-dimensionalnonspace between the deck and the cabin evaporated. The laws of nature between the two spotsequalized.

The black shadow of Trismegistus' magic snarled and leaped down into the trapdoor at Vanity.

She fell beneath its claws, bleeding, screaming, screaming.

Trismegistus pointed his revolver at where I crouched and shot a bullet through my head.

The empty shell of my head. The girl-shaped form of flesh on the deck, at that moment, was amannequin, an empty outer garment I had carefully left behind me when I moved. It was hollow.

The gunshot broke it open like a clay pot.

I had not been twiddling my thumbs while Vanity chatted and bought me time. The initial strokethat paralyzed Victor and sent an azure-burning Quentin, smothering, to his face, all happenedbefore I would move or blink.

But at the same moment when Colin was leaping, with his inspired and impossibly quickmovements, onto the god (whose movements turned out to be even more impossible and evenmore quick), I had slid most of my mass into the fourth dimension and "past" the deck intoVictor's body.

My higher senses showed more details about the Swift God. Like a Hecatonchire, he was afourth-dimensional being. But, where they were thick and blocky, expanding cones in the fourthdimension, he was slim and streamlined, occupying successively smaller and smallercross-sections. They might be able to turn into giants, but he could turn into a pixie, or a dustmote.