Titans of Chaos

The internal nature of the stuff Quentin was made of had been disenchanted, turned unmagical,and neutralized, when the azure beam from the eye of Trismegistus swept over him. But his wandhad not been in his hand at that moment The wand was still magical. It was still wreathed aroundand knotted with lines and webs of spells, set there carefully by Quentin.

The wand struck Quentin's motionless body.

Then it all turned into clay. Quentin's spirit, a shape of dark fire, winged with night and crownedwith black stars, fell out from the bottom of his flesh and slid through the deck. It closed upon theblack cat-shadow clawing Vanity.

The wand, flying off on a mission of its own, smote Phobetor, who turned immediately back intoColin, a nice, human-looking boy.

A boy without a demon-heart to quench. I saw the web of magic slide away, clawing andstrangling, but slipping. Colin swayed unsteadily to his feet, screamed a weak sort of yell, andflopped somewhat unconvincingly at Trismegistus.

Trismegistus, meanwhile, saw Quentin's body turn to fine porcelain, and the beam darted from hismetal eye, sweeping down. Both Quentin and the catlike shadow-thing were struck, but the beammust have hit a more vital part of the shadow-cat; it yowled and vanished, whereas Quentinmerely staggered.

Trismegistus shrank to half his size and lifted his revolver into the fourth dimension, and shot me.

I rotated my girl-body into place to parry and ducked behind it. The bullet bounced off theskintight Amazonian bodysuit I wore. Tee hee.

A probe (made of some sort of music energy) unfolded from a time distortion in the fourthdimension, and fired a bullet of another kind. This one was an Amazonian space-flattener bullet.

I unfolded out from behind my 3-D cross-section, trying to maximize my volume, so that I wouldhave the largest mass possible to absorb and disperse the damage. Three, four, and fivedimensional I became, and, since the restraining weight of the neutronium medium seemedweaker and more flexible here, where the chaos was bubbling to every side, I pushed an inch ortwo into the sixth.