Fugitives of Chaos

began shuffling through the passports slowly.

I jumped up. It was obvious. So obvious. I said, 'It can't be the passports. Those came from ap Cymru.

He is with the Olympians! It's not the Olympians attacking—Quentin just found that out! It's the dress!

My wedding dress!'

Colin said, 'What wedding dress? Did you guys hear some story no one bothered to tell me?'

I was running toward my room. Over my shoulder, I shouted back to them, 'It's not Lamia attacking. It's not Lamia! It's—'

At that moment, even over the mindless roar of the storm, we heard the hideous, tormented, long-drawn-out shriek and rumble of metal plates, vast and heavy metal plates, grinding and twisting, being torn, buckling under unimaginable, titanic pressure.

The deck heeled over at a forty-five degree angle. I slipped and fell to the carpet. The divan was bolted to the deck, but the pile of clothes boxes atop it was not; fabric and cardboard and scented crepe paper fell over my face. I heard crashes behind me as the bottles slid out of the wet bar and clattered to the floor. Our television, our luxurious television, toppled from its stand and fell with a noise of shattering glass.

'I'm not paying for that,' said Colin, who was facedown on the deck.

An alarm hooted through the ship. I heard tumbling crashes, shouts, and screams of alarm and panic ringing from the other cabins and staterooms.

'That felt like we hit an iceberg,' said Quentin, from somewhere behind me.

The lights in the cabin flickered and went dark. It was black as pitch. There were no lights anywhere.

'No,' I said, raising my voice to be overheard above the rising wail of mixed people's voices crying out from the cabins around us, the hoots and klaxons or various alarms. 'It's Echidna. Grendel's mom. She's pulled the ship off course.'

5.

Yellow emergency lights spluttered and came on. As soon as the ship was done with her sharp-angled turn, the deck went flat again. The captain's voice, immensely amplified, rang from loudspeakers, telling the passengers that the ship was still afloat, urging them to be calm. 'We may have caught up against an obstruction. We are investigating the cause…'

I was looking through, or, rather, 'past' the decks and bulkheads and hull of the ship.

Victor said, 'Do you see what's happening?'

I said: 'The water is dark, but, when she grabbed the keel of the ship, there was a flash like emerald-green lightning igniting the water in the sea for a moment. She has transparent flukes like an eel and a sting in her tail like a scorpion sting. I can see the shape of her arms and hands, and the cloud of her long hair as it streams back. She had just ripped away the rudders and propeller of the ship; they were tumbling in the water around her. Her face is very beautiful, but pale and terrible.

'There is something else: ahead of us, at right angles to this normal continuum, is another time-space, intersecting. The intersection takes place along a tubelike zone of discontinuity. Where the tube meets the water, there is a circle of ocean whose inner nature is slightly different than that of our world. Directly below this circle of water is an undersea mountain with a flat top; there is a courtyard and a temple atop this flat area, and lights shining in the windows of the temple. In the courtyard is a sailor, tied upside down to a post, with his eyes torn out. The remains of a sailor. It is about fifty fathoms down. That is where she is taking us. We are going to be passing over that position.'

There was a moment of silence while Victor absorbed this information. Everyone looked blanched and strange in the harsh glare of the emergency lights.

Colin said, 'Orders, Leader? And let me just take this moment to say, I hope the words 'run away'

appeal' somewhere in the commands you are about to baric: out. And I think I speak for all the parts of my presently unkilled body when I say this.'

Victor said slowly, 'There may be complicating factors. This isn't Lamia. Grendel's mother may be here simply to kill the human beings aboard. If we are obligated to risk or sacrifice our lives to save the mortals, we cannot run away.'

Colin quirked his mouth to one side. 'Hmph. Sacrifice lives. I did notice the words 'run away' did appear in the orders, but not exactly in the word order I would have wanted…'

'Enough chatter. The question may be moot,' Victor said, frowning. He looked at Vanity.

She said, 'I can't tell how far away my boat is! She heard me when I called; I can tell she can tell where I am and she is coming, but I don't know any more than that'

Victor turned to Quentin. 'If this is Grendel's mother, and she operates on his paradigm—that is the psionic paradigm, right? The inspiration paradigm? Quentin, you are supposed to be able to trump that paradigm. Can you summon up or banish the inspiration energies, the power source, she is using?'

I said softly, 'I know what it is. The inspiration. She is coming to build another pile of skulls in her garden behind her house.'

Quentin said, 'Let me see what I can do. Incanto sanctum circumque' He tapped his wand on the ground and a soft, pearly light issued from one tip. He held it out at arm's length and waved it around his head. The pearly light drew a clearly visible line of light into a perfect circle around him. A ring of pure light hung, floating, in the air at about the level of his shoulders, serene, luminous, wonderful. It was one of the coolest things I had ever seen.

Quentin took out a hand mirror and placed it on the carpet between his feet. He lowered his head and stared down at it, muttering: ' Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas…'

Victor turned to Vanity. 'Either to fight, or to flee, or to find your vessel, we will have to get up on deck.

All the normal passageways and hatches were locked after the storm reached hurricane proportions.