opening on a different twilight seascape. We were entering strange territory.
'What is this ship?' I said aloud, my voice hushed with wonder.
'Phaeacia,' said Colin.
I gave him a startled look. 'What's that?'
'It is all one ship. All of their ships are part of the same ship, folded into different parts of the dream. This is their empire. The ship is larger than the worlds through which she sails.'
'How do you know?'
He shrugged. 'It is in my heart. I just know. I'm inspired.'
Quentin made a choking noise. For a moment, I thought he was laughing at what Colin had said.
But no. Quentin's face was pale; his eyes had no life in them.
Quentin was wounded. His body showed no scar, no scratch, but I saw the web of moral obligations radiating from him turning black and curling up. His soul had been wounded by the cat-thing.
I said, 'Victor! Do your golden-ray thing to Quentin! Or do something! He's hurt!'
Quentin swayed on his feet and knelt, and put his head to the floor. Then he fell over sideways.
Quentin mumbled something, but his voice, once again, came strangely clear and pristine to the ear: 'My part is played. I turn command over to my second.'
Vanity shrieked, 'Oh no!'
A voice came from Quentin's walking stick. 'Milady, my master bade me speak this word once death has silenced him...'
Vanity snapped, 'He's not dead yet! Shut up!'
'... He says that, if he perishes still trapped within this false world of matter, the Lord of the Dead will claim his soul and prevent his resurrection; nonetheless, he bids you keep his memory in you, and he promises your memory in him will soften the torments of hell to which he will be taken.'
'Shut up!' screamed Vanity. 'He's not dead!' She whirled to face Victor. 'You fixed me. Fix him!'
Victor said, 'He is suffering a software degradation. The electromagnetic envelope where he stores his memory is disintegrating.'
I said, 'Victor, what can you do?'
Victor turned to me. 'For now, nothing. The mission takes priority. Vanity, see if you can get this platform we are riding to dodge; try to lose our pursuer. Amelia, keep an eye on Trismegistus; inform me of his movements. Colin, prevent Trismegistus from approaching through the fourth dimension. You can stop him from using Amelia's paradigm; if he has to come through physical space, Vanity can keep slamming doors in his face. I will sweep for bugs.'
I said, 'Leader, we can't win without Quentin. Not against the god of magic. We need a magician.'
Victor said, 'All we need to do is open our lead. Trismegistus had to introduce a chaos storm into the environment to prevent Vanity from using her powers to escape; if he does that again, I can quell it, or turn the storm against him. Logically, he would not have risked doing that if he had some other way to overtake a Phaeacian. Therefore we should be able to outdistance him. If we can hold him off long enough! We'll see about Quentin as soon as we have time.'
Vanity stood for a moment, her lip trembling, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Then she nodded at Victor, turned, and knelt on the platform. A hatch hidden beneath the boards opened beneath her fingers. Beneath was a control panel, black with dozens of buttons.
She pushed one. A shunt opened in the shaft, and we were kicked to one side. Our fall was now at an angle. A steel door slid into place behind us. The stone around her neck flared green; we passed another threshold, and another door fell to. Again her stone flared.
She was leaving an alternating pattern of different laws of nature behind us. In one stretch of corridor, kinetic energy was directly proportional to speed; in another, it was inverse; in a third, it was inverse cubed. Another section of the corridor behind us turned black as she lowered the speed of light in that segment to five kilometers per hour; if Trismegistus tried to pass through that area at any faster a speed, he would be outside of our frame of reference, unable to affect us.
It was certainly the cleverest thing I ever saw Vanity do.
Clever, but in vain. It was not working.
I said to Colin, 'He's skipping out of the plenum. He's just going around the barriers Vanity is setting up. Can you get him?'
Colin looked behind us and saw nothing but dwindling concentric squares as we fell past deck after deck. He said, 'I don't see him.'
I said, 'Look with your heart. Follow my finger. Can you see the direction I'm pointing? There.'
