out before me. Many of them were smooth parabolas leading up to the dark blotch representing Colin’s position.
And the parabolas were being warped. Like flower stalks bending in the wind, fewer and fewer possible world-paths led to the cliff, as they were pushed left and right, like a curtain parting.
I opened my eyes. Mrs. Wren stood on the cliff with Colin and Quentin.
2.
Mrs. Wren was about twenty yards away from the boys, standing on a tall rock she could not possibly have climbed. And she was in costume.
In her hand she held a broom. It was an old-fashioned besom, just a bundle of twigs and straw tied to a staff, obviously handmade, and by hands that were none too steady.
She wore a green cloak that bore a tall, pointed hood. Around the point of this hood, like a horseshoe around a spike, was a crown of holly leaves with bright red berries. Her face was a smiling mass of wrinkles, surrounding eyes of tired sorrow, eyes that gleamed like black pebbles washed smooth and bright in a stream.
She laughed and smiled, saying, “ ‘Goosey, goosey, gander, whither dost thou wander? Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber?’ ”
If anyone had ever told me I would be frightened to see Mrs. Wren in a dunce cap and wearing a Christmas wreath for a hat brim, I would have laughed. But I was not laughing.
Victor (always the logical one) shouted up, “If she got up, you two can get down. Push past her and find the path she used. Amelia and I are going to try to get to the beach where Vanity is.”
Quentin said, his voice trembling, “Her power comes from deep roots, from the core of the Earth. We can’t just push past her.”
Victor said, “Then kill her.”
A silence seemed to fill the area. Even the sea waves, for a moment, paused.
One seagull, below me, let out a mournful, high-pitched wail.
I said in a voice grown thick with horror, “You can’t mean that, Victor. What’s wrong with you?”
Victor said curtly, “This is not a game. Colin? Quentin?”
Colin, without taking his eyes from the old witch, nodded and hefted his fire axe. Quentin looked sickly pale and did not answer.
Mrs. Wren called out in a bitter voice of mingled mockery and sorrow, “Oho, kill old granny Wren, is it, my goslings? Not enough to leave her alone, and go scampering off, my little ungrateful ducks, no. Is this how you pay her back, the woman who raised you, fed you, and nursed your fevers, kissed your scraped knees and wiped your tears away, changed your shitty diapers, and taught you right from wrong? You pay me back in a false brass coin, my pups, my poppets, my young wolf-cubs. And now you think to wring old granny’s scrawny neck, it is, or chop her frail bones with a terrible sharp axe? Surely, surely, it is the greatest commandment, and the most ancient law, that thou shalt honor the woman who mothered you, that thy years shall be long upon the Earth.”
3.
Victor was walking quickly across the snow toward me. “Can you see a path down?” he shouted.
I said, “The cliff is lower both to the left and right. We can make it down by going either…”
I heard music to my right, beautiful, beautiful violin music.
About thirty yards away, at the point where the cliffs to my right dipped down to a slope leading to the beach, looking as pretty as a china doll in her white fur and earmuffs, Miss Daw was standing in the snow, one fur- lined glove on her bow, one fingering the slender neck, of the violin she had pressed up to her red cheek. She wore a slender buff-colored coat, cute little black boots, and she had a hat of silver fox fur shaped like a dandelion puff on her head.
Victor turned and looked at her. He had come forward toward me, and so was about twenty feet closer to her than I was.
I could see wheels of ivory, as solemn as floating angels, as quiet as U-boats, approaching from the fourth dimension, the high-energy “blue” direction. The nearest had already dipped an arc into three-space, and was sending out concentric waves of energy, whose cross-section manifested themselves in our continuum, as music.
I ran a few steps toward the left-hand slope, not even bothering to wait for Victor.
Scrambling on all fours up the icy granite rocks was Mr. Glum. He was nude, except for a loincloth, and he had what looked like a bearskin rug draped over his head and back. The jawless skull of the bear was on his scalp like a hat; the claws had been tied to his forearms, he had painted his face with a wide brown stripe above the eyes, like a Red Indian. He was watching the placement of his hands and feet, and hadn’t seen me yet.
Over my shoulder, I said to Victor, “Victor, you have to stop Miss Daw! Her power is the one that cancels mine out! I’ll meet you down on the beach with Vanity.”
He said, “Glum is somewhere that way. I can see his emission trail. Can you make it past him?”
I twisted my hips into the fourth dimension to bring another aspect of my legs into this continuum. Centaurish, I now looked like a sleek silver doe from the waist down. I shifted the aspect of my back, so that my wings, made of white light and surrounded by little echoes of music, dipped into this dimensional plane, also. A cluster of misty fireflies and silver bubbles appeared in the air around my head, like a halo, when I “opened” my higher sense-impressions. I could feel my flesh growing denser and hard, hard enough to stop a bullet, as more mass was pulled into this cross-section. This increase in mass-energy made a bluish light shimmer from my flesh.
I reared up on my hind hooves and lashed my unicorn tail. “He’ll have to be pretty quick to stop me!” I said in a voice like a silver bell.
4.
I spread the possible paths down to the beach in front of me like a fan, selected the briefest one, and charged down the slope, with little sparks of energy from higher dimensions flickering and shining around my deer hooves.
With my manifold senses, posted many fathoms in each direction on the shifting foam of curved space, I could now see, not merely in 360 degrees, but globally, overhead, underfoot, in all directions. Surfaces did not impede my sight.
Other senses came into play. I could sense the internal nature and utility of objects; I could see the flow and ripple of time and probability; sense nervous system energies and distortions; I could see moral order (and disorder) like webs (and snarls) interconnecting all the free-willed beings in the area.
Strands went up to two places above the clouds. From the interrelationship of moral duties between the two points, I knew they were brothers. One I did not recognize; the other had an internal nature that was jolly, cold- hearted, kindly, sinister, and calculating. Boggin. The other point must be his brother, Corus, the blue-winged man.
Elsewhere, I could see another strand of moral order reaching to a point beneath the sea, and saw the world-paths caused by the rapid approach of the Atlantean, Mestor.
I focused a distance-negating sense on him, and saw. He had his arms back in a swan dive, legs pointed, and was simply being propelled forward through the deep, his black hair streaming.
The propulsion was a space-effect. The scales on the armor amplified it. I could sense the aura of a similar effect around the white ship, and also deep in the cells of Vanity’s body. The Phaeacian power?
