In the Tabernacle, Nguyen Seth was preaching. He eulogized the sacrifice of the Inner Circle, and vowed to his congregation that their deaths would not be in vain, that their bodies would be foundation stones for the greatness of Deseret. Choirs sang as he spoke, filling the vast space with heavenly music. He was eloquent. His words flew like birds.
Roger Duroc sat near the back, exhausted, not hearing the Elder's speech. His world had been transformed completely by the manifestation of the Jibbenainosay. He was sobered. Now, for the first time, he fully appreciated the vastness of the work upon which he was engaged. Nothing else mattered. Literally, nothing else in the entire history of the universe had
Seth was enthusing the congregation. Tomorrow, when Krokodil was dead, he would select a new Inner Circle, and the process of initiation would begin. Duroc was impressed by the Elder's attention to petty details. A lesser immortal would have sunk to his knees in the presence of the Dark One and let everything else disappear from his mind, but Seth knew how important it was to retain his grip on the minutiae of the Great Work.
Duroc could not think of anything but the Jibbenainosay. When he closed his eyes, he saw the blackness of the thing. Behind tne beautiful harmonies of the Josephite Tabernacle Choir, he heard the Dark One's symphonic roar.
Elder Seth recounted the good deeds—manufactured especially for this service—of the martyrs, and listed their names among the saints. Above him, on the cross, a stone Jesus was forgotten. His tear-filled eyes averted from the preacher. This had nothing to do with Him, either.
Then, in the midst of his flight, Seth paused. He put out his hands to the lectern to steady himself, and shook his head.
He did not resume his speech.
Duroc was alerted, and looked up. He left his seat, and joined the throng pressing towards the Elder.
Nguyen Seth was shaking, in the throes of a
Duroc realized that the finish of the battle being waged to the South would tell heavily on the Elder, whichever way it came out.
Seth staggered away from the altar. His jacket was open, and Duroc saw he was bleeding from the wound in his belly. Yellow tears crept from behind his dark glasses, and trickled down his white cheeks.
Duroc pushed his way through the Josephites. They fell back, reverentially. He knelt by the Elder, and hugged him.
Seth was trembling. Duroc held him fast.
He waved his hand. 'Clear the Tabernacle,' he whispered. His order was taken up, turned into a cry, 'Clear the Tabernacle! Clear the Tabernacle! Clear the Tabernacle!'
The people flooded out, until they were alone.
Seth didn't speak. Duroc took his spectacles off, and saw the naked pain in his master's eyes.
Seth's hand found Duroc's arm, and grasped. His fingers fixed painfully into Duroc's flesh.
He was speaking now, an outrush of words in a dead language.
The battle continued…
The composite creature burst like a squashed puffball when Krokodil's blast hit it. Bodies peeled away from its mass, and were smashed into the sandstorm, where they were lost. The tentacle pulled it up off the ground, and its limbs kicked. There were shreds of bone and fleshmatter swirling around, and it was destroyed completely.
Krokodil yelled in her triumph, and seemed to expand inside herself. She was not just her tiny physical form, she was a vast jacket of energy. Her body was simply the core.
Her consciousness spread inside her extended sphere of power. She outgrew the bubble the Jibbenainosay had left her, and spread out through the storm.
The Dark One could not hide from the Ancient Adversary that way.
Hawk-That-Settles saw Dr Proctor drop into the storm, and felt unsteady. With nothing beneath his feet, it was hard to balance. Then, the sand came up for him, engulfing him completely. He did not know whether he was falling, shooting upwards or flying through the skies. But he was moving.
The Jibbenainosay raised another million tons of sand and held it in the air, thickening the atmosphere. The business with the human tools had been a feint, designed to dislodge the Pawn of the Nullifiers from the womanspeck, Krokodil. It had drawn out its Adversary now, and swelled in readiness for the serious fight.
As its passion built, continua were created and destroyed in the discharges of its energy. Dark thunderbolts struck all over the desert, blasting stretches of sand into polished glass darkmirrors the size of small cities.
Time stopped, then jerked backwards, then forwards again. The Jibbenainosay chewed at the fabric of reality, sucking in the Chaos from the Beyond, and spitting it out in phlegmy dollops.
Throughout Creation, the cacophonies were heard.
Dr Proctor had stopped struggling as soon as the impossibilities started. He accepted his fate as a cartoon character, and allowed the world to stretch like elastic around him. His head had exploded like a firecracker, but instantly reassembled. Anvils, safes and pianos plunged towards hapless citizens, but he was ascending like a hot air balloon.
He knew that, so long as he did not look down, he would never fall like the Coyote to the canyon floor miles below.
The Indian bobbed about, maybe twenty feet away. In Dr Proctor's mindsight, Hawk-That-Settles was three figures: a wiry, gaunt, nearly middle-aged Navaho in bloodied denims, covered in sand; a large bird of prey, wings outspread, talons pointed for a strike; and a tubby cartoon redskin with a big nose, a feather in his oiled black hair, warpaint on his cheeks, and fluffy moccasins on his feet.
In the storm, he heard the Warner Bromers' Orchestra race through a Spike Jones arrangement of 'What Do They Do on a Rainy Night in Rio?' before doing a segue into 'Tell the Doc to Stick to His Practice, Tell the Lawyer to Settle His Case, and Send the Indian Chief and His Tommy-Hawk Back to Little-Rain-In-My-Face.'
The Tasmanian Devil howled for his dinner. He wanted Devilled Hare!
He leaped at the Indian, his legs kicking the air, his claws out. Stretched horizontal, he saw the boiling clouds of sand below, and felt the pull of gravity tugging at his face.
He was frozen for a second, and then the whoosh pulled him down. The sand hit him hard as he sank into it, and then he was plunging through the unknown darkness towards a rocky ground.
It would be all right. He might flatten like a pancake on impact, but he would pull himself together double-quick and bubble back to his original shape within a few beats.
Dr Ottokar Proctor fell…
Throughout the world, seismic instruments exploded at the same instant. Clocks stopped, or raced towards an unimaginable future. Millions subject to epileptic fits fell frothing, and hundreds of thousands of others, hitherto unaffected, joined them. It was as if a maxiscreamer the size of Saturn had been let off next to the planet.
Globally, a number of people equal to the population of the largest megapolis on the planet, died. Heart attacks, spontaneous human combustion, asphyxiation, a new species of instantaneous cancer, cerebral haemorrhage, suicides, massive discharges of bodily electricity, and simple shut-down were the major causes of death, but there was an increase of hostile activity in all the world's war zones, and an epidemic of murder that swept around from country to country like a contagious disease for weeks afterwards.
The computer records of a major corporation, located in a site under Nevada secure against nuclear holocaust, were wiped, precipitating an international money-market collapse that even rocked the solid foundations of the GenTech corporate empire.
Firestorms raged throughout the arctic tundra, and chunks of ice the size and shape of Silbury Hill poked through the sands of the Sahara Desert.
A ring of spy satellites recently put in place by a Gottschalk Geselleschaft in conjunction with the Soviet Union as an attempt to counterbalance GenTech's orbital superiority burned out at the cost of nine hundred billion ECUs. Every nation in the no-longer-terribly-exclusive Doomsday Club opened their silo doors and chained button-pushers to their consoles in readiness for an attack from the unknown.
A stretch of the Caribbean rose to the surface, bearing with it the wrecks of numberless ships and the ruins of a pre-human civilization, while a wave of water rippled across Louisiana, carrying away what little was left there.
