The internal nature of the obligation I could see: It affected everyone who used telephones, telegraphs, cars, other means of transport. Anyone who hired a lawyer, who made money, who trafficked with merchants. Anyone who told a lie. They all owed something to... whom?
Whoever was behind this spell. An Olympian calling in a debt.
Into the middle of the effect, the strands that drew my gaze led. In the epicenter of that blister, deep in the dreamworld, was a small bubble of stable reality where the laws of Earth were mimicked.
There, I saw a black mountainside surrounded by clouds of twilight red. Here on a shelf of rock, a score of columns stood in a circle, a temple with no roof.
On the altar-stone, kneeling, back straight, head down, buttocks on her heels, was a feminine figure wearing a red kimono. Her hair was black and straight, shining like India ink. The red silk fabric was decorated with images of butterflies and bats, blank-faced cherubs presenting lilies to tiny skeletons. In a semicircle before her on the stone there gleamed a strand of crystal marbles, arranged in pairs. In one hand she held a knife, in the other an ivory drinking horn.
To her left stood the girl-form of ap Cymru: dark-haired and dark-eyed Laverna, goddess of fraud. She was wearing a skintight black sheath of fabric and carrying a snake in; either hand.
One was lashing its tail in the air; the other was twining her wrist, a living bracelet.
Laverna's lips moved. My sense that detected inner meanings of things told me what their words meant to convey, even though I did not hear them: Try again. If she is not asleep, then she is fleeing. We must come at them one at a time....
There was a third woman, standing to the other side. She was dressed in a folded garb of many pockets and pleated layers of cloth, intricate, with sea motifs of green and blue. Her hair was red as new blood. She wore a long veil of aquamarine. I saw only her eyes, which were emeralds sparkling with light.
The words from the woman in white were: No need. She looks at me now. I feel the pressure of her gaze. She is outside of the plane of Earth, and alone. Another of my kind is also watching her-the Princess Nausicaa. The two are apart.
When the woman in the red kimono raised her head and her loose hair parted, I saw it was Lamia.
I saw the raw and empty red sockets where her eyes had been. I knew now what the marbles in the semicircle before her were: disembodied eyes.
The marbles twinkled and turned toward me.
Lamia-I see her. I see them both.
Laverna said-Begin!
Lamia upended the drinking horn. A splash of blood struck the stone before her. She threw back her head, mouth wide. I heard no scream, yet still I sensed the meaning of what was said: Wives of the Psychopomp, I release thee: All ye fair captives who sold white bodies and dark souls to the lust of Trismegistus for promises of escape from Hell, I put aside your chains: Let slip thy leash, and run thee down my prey!
The red-haired woman raised her hand, saying, Guardian of Dreams! I call upon our ancient covenant. I open the gate, I break the boundaries, I let pass my Lord's many wives into the daylight world: I let pass the laws of dreams as well.
A green stone, a twin to the one I had seen on Boggin's toe, glimmered in her palm like a star made of poison.
(I noticed then, too late... far too late... that the glinting strands whose flash, had attracted my attention were running from Laverna to me to the guitar I still held. My debt to ap Cymru.) The blister from the dream-plane expanded, grew brighter, and intersected the plane of Earth.
The blister erupted. There was an explosion, then darkness.
The heavy medium of hyperspace shook with the concussion. A force violent beyond all description sent me tumbling end over end.
An automatic reflex had made me turn headfirst into the wave, and to 'yank in' the various red and blue limbs and wings of my hyperbody. I folded myself into a three-dimensional shape (to narrow my 4-D cross-section to nothing) and let the concussion flow over me. It helped-I was not broken in half-but I still was thrown.
I did not lose consciousness, but my senses spun. I remember dazed images of useful tubes through hyperspace, used by the Atlantean ships, being blown and twisted by the explosion, and darkening to uselessness.
I remember seeing the hidden half-mile-tall giants of Mulciber's army being scattered hither and yon throughout four-space. The blister itself, the source of the light, erupted into Earth's plane, depositing armies of dream-women into the sleeping metropolis and blowing aside the normal laws of nature of Earth in the Los Angeles area-I saw the internal nature of all objects flutter violently with the new impositions-become dreamlike, charged with magic.
The echoes of the fading light failed, and it was suddenly as dark here as it had ever been in hyperspace above England. Remember England, where I had gotten lost less than an inch or two away from the plane of Earth? Here, I was at least fifty yards away, and had been blown farther still, and tumbled. I did not know at what angle my present three- body might be relative to Earth's space-time.
So I floundered for another long minute or so in the gloom and gluey thickness of hyperspace.
