“Wait!” the Outcast cried, knowing he was snared in the web of fury that Herne spun but finding himself helpless to resist it. He wanted to be with them, he had to be with them.
“I’m coming too. Wait!”
The Outcast spoke a word of power and became lightning himself, streaking above the Hunt as they pounded from the shore of the Rox onto the frothing water of the bay, the mounts and hounds riding over the waves as if they were nothing more than rolling, transient hills. The Outcast followed, his breath fast, the wind of his passage ruffling his hair and making him squint. In a few minutes they came to the stone edifice of the Wall itself. Herne looked up, and the Outcast grinned back. He sent his power down to the Wall and opened the great gates facing Manhattan, letting the immense doors of oak and steel swing out to loose the Hunt. He flung himself forward to keep pace, crying as Herne sounded the horn again.
And he found that he could go no farther. The air became a solid fist and pushed back at him. He could not pass his own boundary. His world would not let him go.
“No!” the Outcast wailed, almost weeping. “Please!”
But the lust was already fading, his mind emerging from the spell of the Hunt as it moved farther and farther away from him. He could feel the strings that bound him eternally to the great form of Bloat. Those bonds were far, far stronger.
He could not ride with the Hunt. He was a prisoner in the Rox, confined to his own land.
The Outcast materialized on the top of the nearest tower. He pounded his fists on the stones there — they seemed substantial enough, cutting his flesh so that he bled and cried out. There, his hands gripping the cold blocks of granite, he watched the green fire and the blue lightnings of the Hunt recede over the bay, the turbulent cloud of death riding toward the city.
He found that he was crying, and there were too many reasons for the sorrow for him to sort out why.
Once, almost in another lifetime, it seemed, Wyungare had visited Outback-Disneyland. The experience, business aside, had been horrifying. It all came back. The stately voyage to the Rox rapidly evolved into Mr. Goanna’s Wild Flume Ride.
First, there was the environment. The skies, what he could see of them through the swirls of fog, were ablaze with lights, most of them moving at speed. No missiles, heavy shells, or other bombardment, at least. But glowing streaks of exhaust that might be reconnaissance craft. There was a lot of air traffic behind him over Manhattan. Many helicopter landings. A couple of times he saw what looked like human figures moving through the air rapidly, without benefit of craft.
Then all hell burst loose as a sudden thunderstorm seemed to brew over the approaching island. Wyungare blinked and averted his face as lightning forked and linked sky and earth. It looked like a radiant vision tree impressed on his retinas. The thunder rolled past a fractional second later, the concussion shoving the air before it like the blow of a nulla nulla.
Wyungare thought he heard howling, as though from rather larger predatory throats than he cared to encounter in the middle of the Upper Bay. Madhi? he wondered. Perhaps extremely large dingos. Lightning blazed again.
Further speculation was lost as the alligator dipped his snout like a diving plane and water sheeted across Wyungare’s fourteen-foot reptilian vessel. The black cat leapt backward and the Aborigine found himself with nearly two stone of soaked cat wound around his chest.
Does this reptile fear thunder and lightning? he wondered. It couldn’t be.
It wasn’t.
Jack’s massive jaws opened and closed like a medieval portcullis. The webbed, slightly glowing tail of some unknown fish flopped frantically outside of the teeth. The alligator gulped and the tail disappeared within.
Ah, thought Wyungare. Supper. Jack was a mighty engine that needed fuel. Feeding could not easily be denied.
The alligator jigged through the bay waves with remarkable agility considering his size. Jaws opened. Jaws closed. Some of the prey screamed.
The Aborigine tried to hook his strong toes around the curve of the reptile’s body. He leaned forward, keeping his center of gravity as low as he could, attempting not to be thrown loose into the frigid water. Crushed between Wyungare’s and Jack’s rough hide, the black cat wailed.
Then Jack’s particular feeding frenzy ceased. His teeth clicked together decisively a few more times as he turned his snout back toward the Rox.
Wyungare tried to let communication sink from his fingertips into the armor protecting Jack’s head. You’re doing fine, he wanted to say. Now let us make land. It will aid your digestion. And mine, he thought.
The feeling of approaching Bloat’s psychic barrier crossed a spectrum of apprehension. It’s like — Wyungare thought a bit fuzzily — it’s like approaching a glass wall at speed in a Land Rover. He thought of insects squashed on windscreens. He felt an unaccustomed dread, and then a sudden terror, the abrupt image of shattering glass smashing around him. He felt as though he were breathing in a cloud of microscopic shards. They stung like ice, like invisible razors, like venomous, stinging mites. Wundas. Evil spirits.
The Wall was closer than it had looked. Suddenly it loomed directly in front, the waves slapping against the peculiarly textured gray stone blocks. The Aborigine’s head cleared.
Wyungare touched the alligator and suggested that he follow the curve of the Wall in the direction the Aborigine believed a gate to be.
Indeed, the Aborigine, gator, and cat arrived at the gate after the voyage of only another hundred yards. Jack docked as smoothly as the Staten Island Ferry pulling into its slip. The side of the alligator bumped up against what appeared to be oaken beams, but sounded more like heavy steel ringing like a gong.
Wyungare gingerly rapped his fist against the door. It did feel like metal. And it rang like metal. His head throbbed. He pounded harder.
With a rusty creak, the gate swung inward.
Wyungare said to the darkness, “Thank you, I was afraid I was going to have to bloody my knuckles.”
Light grew within the gateway. The entrance was lined with truly grotesque Boschian creatures. Beside them, the intermixed jokers looked like matinee idols.
“You a nat or what?” said one of the jokers.
“What,” said Wyungare. He motioned. “This is an alligator. That’s a cat.”
“I know the nursery rhyme,” said the joker. “So where’s the owl?”
Wyungare stopped, bewildered for a moment.
“Don’t worry, you’ll catch on,” said the roller-skating penguin, suddenly weaving its way through the crowd of guards. “So. You have business with his Bloatitude? Or just another version of the Circle Line cruise way off course.”
“That is correct,” said Wyungare. “The first hypothesis. I have important business with the one called Bloat.”
"Well, he’s pretty busy,” said the penguin. “The war and all. Could you perhaps come back tomorrow?”
Wyungare felt like he was in Lewis Carroll Land. “Tomorrow, no. It is essential I see your… governor now.”
The penguin spun on the tip of one skate. “It helps me concentrate,” he said once he’d stopped. “All right, then. It’s off to the castle with you.”
Wyungare stepped into the gateway.
“Them too,” said the penguin, dipping its beak toward the cat and the alligator.
The guards, joker and simulacra alike, drew back when Jack hauled his long, armored body out of the bay and into the opening in the Wall.