CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nobody
IV
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Golden spirals blossomed in the black depths of the serpent’s eyes. The seams between its severed segments sealed. Honey no longer leaked out of it, yet it continued to guzzle the glowing rain, long past the point when it seemed it should have overflowed.
The temple had become a furnace. Wilburn’s clothes clung to his skin. Steam coiled off the blood-and-honey lake as it absorbed the heat rising up through the searing stone. Wilburn was amazed that his bare feet could, well, bear it— until he glanced down and discovered them hovering a good three feet above the floor. Well… huh. He’d been under the impression that he couldn’t do magic within the invisible circle. Was someone else making him fly? A quick test revealed that no, Wilburn was doing it himself.
He swung around in the air to face where Iddo, Alfajean, and Buttrom also floated, watching him from beyond the ring of chanters. Wilburn pointed to his feet, then scratched his head, then shrugged. Iddo gave him two nods. Wilburn scratched his head again. Iddo turned and said something to Alfajean—probably something like, Hold up two fingers, will you?—because that was what the angel did. Iddo nodded twice again. Was he saying… two? Two what? Two different kinds of magic, kineturgy and psychovatry? Wilburn didn’t see why one should work if the other didn’t. Or… maybe he did. They’re all psychovates, he remembered Iddo saying. The entire group is manifesting a collective shield. That’s something only a handful of elite units in the Argylonian military are capable of, but never in such large numbers. That had been before the ritual had really gotten going, though. Now the crowd of psychovates surrounded the pavilion, and Wilburn was inside and Iddo wasn’t. Could it be that simple?
No, it couldn’t. The girl complicated things. She was also inside the pavilion, yet Wilburn sensed no more from her than Iddo. She could shield him out, but he couldn’t shield her out, and he had a hunch the girl would make mental contact if the opportunity arose—whether or not she would use that opportunity to attack him was a separate question. The opportunity had not arisen, however, because psychovatry wasn’t working. It was as if whatever the chanters were doing was taking up all the Thoughtspace in the temple, leaving barely enough room for Wilburn to conduct his private thoughts.
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Spells within spells… The phrase popped into Wilburn head as if Iddo had thought it to him, except it was his own voice—call it wizard’s intuition. The atmosphere in the temple was changing, the pressure rising as it had right before the iron cage had opened. Right before the BANG. Spells within spells… Yes, that was how the ritual worked. Spells within spells… just like balloons within balloons: the popping of the first only the inflating of the next one. Cyclic repetition… Hadn’t Iddo said this was the structure of the enchantment? Dozens of rituals, performed thousands of times over… Wilburn sensed that it was so, a cycle of creation and destruction… a building cycle, because the energy was never lost; it was merely transferred into larger and larger containers. Balloons within balloons… And now the bigger balloon was stretching tight and tighter, and the bigger BANG was coming, and when it came… well, it was gonna be one heck of an explosion.
CLATTER CLANG CRASH
The sound of the six chalices tumbling down the outer steps of the temple jarred Wilburn from his reverie. Every chanter in the congregation had now tasted the black potion, and the last to drink had then tossed the golden cups over their shoulders like apple cores. Before the clamor could die away, it was drowned out by a thunderous CRACK. Hot air buffeted Wilburn as the temple heaved and jagged fissures rent the floor, draining the lake of blood and honey in an instant. Overhead, the mandala of hexagons began to turn. It spun faster and faster, the pattern blurring, and a new pattern of impossible colors emerging from the blur: a spiral fractal like the center of a sunflower, but deep, a tunnel stretching up and up and up, and where it ended, if it ended, Wilburn couldn’t see, because the center of the spiral was awash with the blinding radiance of the Category-Q.
The Q was like a miniature sun now, and the great serpent was swimming up toward it. Wilburn squinted, raising a hand to shade his eyes. For a moment, he was sure he saw two serpents, one black, one gleaming gold, their lithe bodies twining back and forth in an ascending double helix. Then he had to look away. It was too bright.
Wilburn blinked, trying to dispel the helical afterimages branded on his vision. He wasn’t looking when the two serpents disappeared into the light, nor when the first larva fell out of it—lucky for him—because the pale, squirming thing was the quintessence of repellence. It glistened slimily, its semi-translucent skin revealing the delicate, pulsing organs underneath. Nor did Wilburn see the larva metamorphose as it plummeted, maturing to a pupa, then to full adulthood in a heartbeat and a half. Wings sprouted from its thorax even as its thorax became a thorax, and they found their rhythm just in time to save it from a splattery demise. So the hornet was born flying. Wilburn saw none of it, but he heard—a harsh ZZZZZ from overhead, striking an otherwordly harmonic with the ever-droning chant.