The music cut into my wings and tail. I smelled my own blood burning, and I fell, three-dimensional again, to the deck. I did not feel the pain just yet. But I could not feel my right arm either.
Trismegistus had to pull all his mass back into the shape he wore, the small shape, because the music burning me was going off so close to him. Colin grappled him for a moment, biting into his neck veins with an unenthusiastic sort of chomp.
During that moment, Victor, our human-size Victor, dressed in a skintight cloth of metal foil, popped out of a coffin-shaped slot or hangar in the tail of the dead dragon body. He was faceless and eyeless, his visage merely a blank mask of bony substance. He reached back inside with a ray of magnetism and manipulated some control. The guns lining the back and sides of the dragon swiveled to cover Trismegistus, and opened fire.
Colin rolled away from Trismegistus and put his hand somehow through and inside me without touching me, plucked out the deadly music with his hand. That saved my life, though it did not stop the pain or internal bleeding.
The music-thing looked like a scorpion made of fire in Colin's hand. He threw it at Trismegistus.
The barrage of various heavy weapons lining the dragon armor, now that Trismegistus could not step sideways into the fourth dimension, could hurt him.
Or, they would have hurt him, had he not been able to outrun the bullets shot at him. Trismegistus turned into a blur of motion, but it was a blur localized at about a hundred yards off the port side of our damaged ship, and, with no space-bending techniques at hand, he could not outrun some of Victor's energy weapons, many of which were firing at faster-than-light speeds Newton would allow, but not Einstein.
Colin waved his hand at the chaos muck boiling and seething off the port side. His teeth were red and clenched with pain; his fist was shaking with weakness. His voice was breathy and lacked timbre: 'Dream-stuff! Your Prince calls! Dance and play! Rip and rend and slay!'
Evidently, despite his weakness, he was inspired with pain and anger, because the whole environment caught fire, and the liquid earth, which had merely been bubbling and splashing, now erupted as if a million land mines, buried beneath the fluid gunk, had all gone off at once. The whole section of ground in that quarter jumped into the sky; the sky there fell.
The blue metal eye shot out of the mouth of the dragon and floated over to the blind and eyeless Victor. A valve or aperture opened in Victor's brow, and he placed the metal eye half within.
It glowed and rotated. Now Victor could see again.
The metal foil covering his body puffed up with magnetic charge. He moved. He was here, gently picking up both Colin and me.
Then he was down belowdeck. Vanity had been clawed and cut by the beast, and I saw red arterial blood spurting. Quentin's spirit was dissolving and flickering, but it was bent over Vanity, trying to apply pressure to her horrible wounds. His hands were insubstantial, though, and the precious blood simply flooded through them. Tears of fire were burning on Quentin's cheeks. He was too dazed to realize that his hands were only made of phantom-stuff, and could not help her.
Victor's voice came from his chest plate, amplified tremendously to outshout the thunder of the guns and thunderbolts going off overhead: 'You'll die without your body, Quentin.'
Quentin moaned something, but his wand, up on deck, tapped impatiently.
Quentin's spirit flashed upward through the deck boards and returned with his clay body. The spirit seemed to have great difficulty getting back into it, however. The dark and fiery silhouette was trying to wriggle into it through the mouth like a man putting on a wetsuit, but the spirit was losing fire and color, as if it were fainting, bleeding, dying.
The wand jumped up in the air, and a light came from it.
It poked the Quentin-body in the mouth, and seemed to act as a shoehorn. The spirit was slurped inside, a reverse-genie returning to a tiny lamp.
Colin could not stand. He dragged himself on his belly over to Vanity, he bit back a cry of horror and alarm, and he lifted up his hands to apply pressure to her spurting wounds. 'Tourniquet!' His voice was desperation. 'Tourniquet here, or it is death!'
Victor was having blood drip out of one hand. No, not blood, but his molecular blood- creatures, the ones programmed to heal.
With his other hand, Victor was tearing up long strips from the deck boards he knelt on, which were bubbling and turning into bandages when the beam from his one eye struck them.
Victor's metal cloth suit ripped itself into shreds or tentacles. One strand formed a noose around Vanity's gushing arm, tightening. The spurting stopped. The others, like a hundred-armed hydra of medicine, took bandages, applied them, probed other wounds.
I am ashamed to admit I was too much in pain to move. That does not sound shameful, does it?
But the truth was, I was too much in pain to try to move, and I could not think straight. The only thing I was thinking at the time was, Why are they all looking at Vanity? Why isn't Victor helping me?
Sometimes the best in people comes out during emergencies. Sometimes not.
