and the Arizona Korps were cutting loose again.
Stack saw a shower of blips on the screen. 'Dead ahead, Leona. Five ve-hickles. They're stalled.'
Then, the whole screen lit up, a solid mass of light.
The cruiser swerved as Tyree looked over at the radar, but she got it back on the hardtop.
The glitch was gone.
'What was that?'
Stack tapped the screen. 'According to this heap of junk, that was a flying object the size of the U.S.S.
Tyree laughed. 'You startled me there. I'll have the system stripped and overhauled when we get back to Fort Apache.'
'Yeah.'
A thought occurred to him. 'Say, Leona, do you want me to log it as a UFO?'
Tyree sneered. 'Nahhh. That gag's stale already.'
The Jibbenainosay cleaved through the air, gradually delighting in the unfamiliar sensations of physical existence. The human brains it had absorbed taught it much about this universe. Its new form was awkward in some ways, but there were things about it that offered possibilities.
It had never had things to hurt before. It found that it enjoyed inflicting pain. Even more, it relished taking away the spark of life from these scumspeck beings.
Soon, this universe would belong to the Dark Ones.
'Dr Proctor, you're…?'
'Better?' The Devil laughed in his face. 'Yes, I suppose I am.'
Hawk-That-Settles was backed up against a winerack. The bottles were long gone, but in their nests were a series of figurines. This was where Dr Proctor stored his cartoon creations.
The Devil had his whittling knife, and was making leisurely passes with it, just under Hawk's nose.
'There's a storm coming, isn't there Tonto? I can feel it in the air.'
'Yes. A bad one.'
'Do you perhaps know anything about the history of your people?'
Hawk gulped, the shining knifepoint a hair's breadth away from his adam's apple.
'Of course you do. You are a Son of Geronimo, are you not?'
Hawk nodded his head.
'Do you know what General Phil Sheridan, the war hero, said…'
Hawk knew what was coming next.
''The only good Indians I ever saw,' old Phil said, 'were dead.''
Hawk's eyes went to the doorway. It was too far off. He would never make it.
'Tonto, how would you like to be a good Indian?'
She remembered Doc Threadneedle trying to tell her to stay human. She supposed he wouldn't have been proud of her.
The horizon was invisible now, the air thick with sand. She could hear the Jibbenainosay coming through the whirling winds.
Krokodil hoped there was a way she could make it up to the Doc.
Where was Hawk-That-Settles? He should be here to see her take the final steps, to see her progress to the Seventh Level of Spirituality and beyond.
It loomed out of the sands like a whale, and towered over her. There was a face in the middle of it.
She recognized the likeness of Nguyen Seth.
It smiled, feelers leaking from its black eyelids.
She remembered her father's favourite saying from Nietzsche.
'Come on. Jib,' she said. 'Make me stronger.'
VIII
Dr Proctor's knife shook, the point just under Hawk's chin.
Then, the world turned upside-down.
The Devil was pulled across the room, as the wineracks wrapped around him. Hawk was struck to his knees by a flying brick. He saw the stones of the ceiling shake loose. Ancient mortar fell as white dust.
Hawk choked, and held an arm up to ward off falling masonry. The whole monastery was going to come down on his head, thousands of tons of European stone.
Sand was blowing through in a throat-filling hurricane. Hawk covered his mouth. You could drown in this thick swirl.
He couldn't see Dr Proctor any more, but he could hear the man thrashing around, breaking the wineracks like matchwood. A carved Yosemite Sam hit him in the face. There was a lot of debris flying around, as if the cellar were the focus of a giant whirlwind.
The floor fell, like an aircraft hitting a pocket of turbulence, and Hawk plunged down with it, landing hard. He thought his ankle might be broken.
He knew this wasn't an earthquake.
A chunk of ceiling struck the flagstones, and burst like a stone frag grenade. Hawk heard Dr Proctor scream as the shrapnel hit him.
Hawk looked up, and saw light through the hole. Stones disappeared, pulled upwards, and sunlight, filtered through sand, streamed in. The whole of Santa de Nogueira was being pulled apart and tossed into the air. This was in the cellars. Hawk couldn't imagine what it would take to pick the structure apart piece by piece and still keep the chunks in the air.
Then he was seized by hands of wind, and tugged upright like a marionette. Pain lanced through his chest. He must have broken his ribs again.
The sand got into his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He shook his head, trying to fight the smothering blasts. There was nothing solid under his feet any more, and yet he was being drawn upwards.
Stones bounced off his head and shoulders as he rose through the storm. It was only a question of how soon he would be smashed against a lump large enough to do serious damage.
Through the sand, he could see Dr Proctor, also floating steadily upwards. The madman's limbs flailed, and he was screeching. To think that Hawk had feared Dr Proctor, had imagined that this pathetic puppet was the Devil.
They were well out of the cellars now. Hawk couldn't see any ground below, but thought it must be hundreds of feet beneath him. They were above the layer of the whirling stones. The skeleton of the monastery still stood, stripped of its bulk.
Hawk had flown in his spirit dreams, but this was the first time his physical form had been so elevated. In his dreams, he had walked the winds with the
Then, suddenly, he was above the sandcloud, floating in the still air. Dr Proctor broke the surface of the sandstorm at the same time, and the two men shouted to each other.
There was calm here, and a light breeze. The storm below was like a sea of agitated grit. Stones, wooden beams and gravemarkers were tossed on the surface of the clouds, being thrown up and sucked down. Krokodil was down there somewhere, swimming through the sand. The sky stretched away to a blue infinity, and the sun bore down on them.
In the gentle warmth, Hawk suddenly felt all the injuries he had sustained in his flight upwards. His face had been effectively sandblasted, and one of his legs hung useless.
He couldn't hear what Dr Proctor was shouting, but it didn't matter. Words were no good. All the songs Two-
