Titans of Chaos

I helped the negotiations by nullifying as many as I could reach of the controlling monads of thepoisonous death-wish inside those bits of matter cooperating for the destruction of Victor. It tookme only a split second, while Trismegistus was striking down Colin.

I saw I was not going to be able to save the huge and armored Telchine battle-body. Part of thecompromise was that the death-seeking matter would be allowed to kill that giant body. Too bad.

It was magnificent inside, a cathedral on a molecular level, intricate and deadly as one of HerMajesty's Dreadnoughts.

If Trismegistus turned his head, or opened his upper-dimensional senses to look, he would haveseen Victor escaping with his life. The shining usefulness, the reciprocal agreements between thewarring groups of molecules, would have been as clear to him as it was to me.

And he would have seen me, too.

But he was blind in one eye on that side, and folded his body back into a three-dimensional solid(all his little forms like nested Russian dolls, one within the other) during the moment when hechanted his death-curse at Colin. (Unable to do two paradigms at once? Perhaps.) So he did notsee me. During that moment.

During the next moment, he was talking to Vanity, and she was flashing her eyes and heaving herbosom at him.

I don't meant that the way it sounds, but, gosh, if I had been a superpowered mad god, recentlyescaped from Hell, here to destroy the universe, I would have paused to chat up Vanity, too. Imean, she has that way about her, bright and fiery good looks that draw men like moths to candleflame. And she had undone the three buttons of her blouse again.

And she did what any girl has to do to keep a guy talking: She asked him questions about himself,gave him a chance to brag.

And even a swift god cannot do three things at once.

So, during that moment, I reached into Quentin's body and tried to move the poisonous gas in hislungs into the fourth dimension, while leaving his lungs in three. It did not really work. My uppertendrils and wings and such can manipulate from rather fine energies, but I was not used todealing with a cloud of discrete particles.