"It's a mathematical way to say that measurements made in such a vicinity would show a warpage. A region where length measurements make no sense.
"Impossible," Russell said.
"I can show it's true by integrating over the manifold," Markham said with irritation. No wonder this guy didn't get the Nobel for peace, he thought.
Russell screwed his lips around, squinted at the sand. and nodded grudgingly.
Markham was glad to finesse the point, because he was a little rusty with this area of mathematical physics, and anyway it was hard to do calculations in the dirt. The majestic authority of mathematics lost a lot in this medium.
"I fail to follow," Russell said. "A physical distance can't change from positive to negative."
"Right. That means there must be some singularity there."
"Where?" the wasp-woman piped in.
"I'd say at the boundary of the time trap. Inside, dt == 0 and dx is a real, ordinary quantity. But not if we pass from ordinary time into a time-frozen state."
"Magic not work in devil's paw," the wasp-woman said. "I see many who try, they shrunk to toads."
Markham shrugged. "I've always wondered what it would be like to be a frog."
Russell said, "I assuredly have not."
"If you were, wise one," the wasp-woman said, giggling, "would you eat me?"
Her tinkling laughter made the Englishman redden.
They were tired and dejected long before Markham spied a twisted tree and a crumbling flank of rocky ridge that had stuck in his memory. From Acre he was able to work their way around the broad sweep of a hill, across a roiling rain-swollen stream, and down into a low range of scrub forest. In there, somewhere, the time trap had nearly snared them.
But someone or something was blocking the way, Red flares lit the canopy of milky clouds above, paling the dull sun-like glow overhead. Sudden rattling reports rolled down from those clouds, like news from an Olympian struggle.
A strange low wooong wooong answered from the pines nearby.
"Rather odd," Russell remarked, blinking owlishly.
"I'm pretty damn sure the time trap was that way, down a gully and up in some ruins. Remember?"
"I've never been one for spatial relationships."
A clanging from the clouds, like a vast cracked gong. The wasp-woman's tiny voice called, "Demons? I drink!"
"Stay with me. You might be useful," Markham said.
He crouched down the way he had seen men do in combat movies and ran across a small clearing for the cover beyond. It had never been obvious that running bent over was actually effective. It kept you out of the way if they shot a little high, but on the other hand it slowed you down, too, exposing you to fire longer. Halfway across the wooong sound came and something rushed over him. There was no loud report, nothing, just the wake of something huge passing by. It cast a sudden cold stab into his back.
He reached the other side and plunged into the trees. He felt the wasp-woman inching across his neck. It made his skin crawl, but she wouldn't be able to keep up if she didn't hitch rides. To him she seemed a woman, human, someone he in his old fashioned way felt instinctively should be protected ... not a mere makeshift insect. He was doubly sure that back in Life, he would never have felt this way. He could not quite understand why; was Hell changing him this quickly? He had been here only a few weeks, at most.
There was movement ahead. Markham watched vague ivory forms glide among the trees. He studied them carefully. A cool light refracted around them in waving strings, giving a watery sensation of multiple surfaces, of solid bodies that were nevertheless in constant flux. Alabaster light seeped among the branches.
Shadows shrouded their ghostly passage. Markham noticed there was utter silence here, as though nature were holding its breath.
"What's on?"
Russell thumped down beside him, panting from his run. His hearty salute had seemed to boom in the stillness, making Markham jump. But the gliding, blocky, wavering things did not seem to notice or change their stately movements.
"What are those?"
"Not dragons."
"Maybe the Devil's come up with something new."
The wasp-woman called into Markham's ear, "Hoar Gods."
"What're they?"
"I saw before, ere I came to six-legged perdition. Hoar God bring frost.
Banish devils." She held onto his ear with six spindly legs and underlined her description by stamping on his earlobe in some kind of tattoo signal.
"But they're not from, er..." Russell seemed reluctant to use the word. "Ah, God, are they?"
"From Hoar place," she said.
"Do you have any notion of what god they represent?" Russell went on. "What were the gods of your time?"
"I come from when Caliph ruled, awaiting the return of Mohap. Christ was boy, Mohap big man with red member." She seemed pleased to be addressed so seriously.
"Um. Some ancient era," Russell said, losing interest, and with a sharp clap the tree next to him dissolved like a melting candle.
"Down!" Markham cried.
Wooong-and trees behind them turned to glassy, sliding waterfalls.
The two men pressed themselves flat. Another wooong rippled through the air.
Markham turned and studied the patchy damage in the forest, trying to triangulate the source.
"Funny," he said quietly. "There's no pattern."
"Not coming from one place?"
"There's no design to it, as near as I can see. Just random gulps taken out of the trees."
"Perhaps they're not firing at us at all."
The wasp-woman's small buzzsaw whine persisted, "Hoar Gods will chill all."
Markham chuckled, despite a keen sense of threat. "How long does it take for Hell to freeze over?"
"Hoar Gods try. Come, go, try!" She rasped out her displeasure at his levity, whirring around his head. He remembered the long stinger and caught the clear glint of paralyzing poison at its tip.
This sobered him more than did the dissolved trees.
Russell commented pensively, "It does seem quite as chilly here as on an Oxford morning. I can't recall Hell being this damp, either."
Markham studied the shifting, quilted radiance ahead. "We can't be far from the time trap."
"Can this be part of it?" Russell asked.
"They can't be inside the trap, or they wouldn't be moving at all."
"Hoar gods come from stillness!" the wasp-woman explained, as if to demented children. She buzzed him again, spitting at his eyes. Markham began to see why she might well have deserved to be sentenced to insecthood. Whoever she had been in a past life, it certainly wasn't Salome.
"Come out of a space where there is no change in time?" Russell shook his head. "What can that mean?"
"Look, there's got to be a zone where the spatial interval approaches zero. Maybe these Hoar Gods come from that... whatever it is," Markham finished lamely. "We could try to speak to them, discover-"
"Forget that. They might try out their woooom-gun on you, instead."
"Well, I think it is worth the-"
"We've got to get around them, reach the time trap itself."
"1 still believe-"
"I help," the wasp-woman called eagerly.
"How?" Markham asked disbelievingly.
"I can make them think only of me."
"Well..."
"If I can prick them, they die!"
Markham eyed the sharp needle she carried and decided this was as good an idea as any he had.
Her mood swings were enough to put him on edge, and he would be glad to have that outsized weapon pointed at someone-or something-else.
"Good, I like that. Look, we can try to work our way around ..."
It all happened so fast Markham had to rely on pure Instinct.
One moment he and Russell were creeping forward, trying to flank around the watery alabaster radiance. The wasp-woman had droned off among the bushes, to distract the entities she called the Hoar Gods, but could not farther describe. Russell had remarked that he thought that she had simply affixed a folk-theology term from her own era to a phenomena she couldn't understand.