"Don't you see them?"
"See what?"
"The women."
"Put your damn spectacles on, Larry."
He did so. The world came into focus around him, in all its confusion. But the woman had gone.
"God, no-"
He pulled his spectacles off again, but the vision had escaped him into the bright summer sky.
In the midst of this confusion-Dorothy Bullard escaping, Buddenbaum going after her, the band falling down like tin soldiers-Tesia had made her way to the center of the crossroads. It had taken her perhaps five seconds to do so, but in those seconds she had been assailed b a legion of sensa'Y tion,,, her spirits lifted one moment and dropped the next, her body wracked and caressed by turns, as though whatever lay at the heart of the crossroads was testing her wits to breaking point. Clearly the town woman had failed the test. She was bawling like an abandoned child. Buddenbaum, however, was made of sterner stuff. He was standing a couple of yards from Tesla, staring down at the ground.
"What the fuck's going on?" she yelled to him. He didn't look up. Didn't even speak. "Can you hear me?" "Not. Another. Step," he said. Despite the cacophony, and the fact that he spoke in a near-whisper, she heard him as clearly as if he'd murmured in her ear.
A terrible suspicion rose in Tesla, which she instantly voiced.
"Are you Kissoon?" she said.
This certainly got his attention.
"Kissoon?" he said, his lip curling. "He's a piece of shit. What do you know about him?"
That answered her question plainly enough. But it begged another. If he wasn't Kissoon, but he knew who Kissoon was, then who was he?
"He's just some name I heard."
His face was quite a sight: a mass of bulges, about to burst. "Some name?" he said, reaching for her. "Kissoon's not some name!" She dearly wanted to retreat from him, but a part of her was irrationally possessive of this contested ground. She stood it, though he took hold of her by the neck.
"Who are you?"
She was afraid for her life.
"Tesia Bombeck," she said.
"You're Tesla Bombeck?" he said, plainly amazed.
"Yes," she said, barely able to get the words out from under his thumbs.
"Do you mind... letting go-"
He drew her closer to him. "Oh God," he said, with a twisted little smile on his face. "You're an ambitious little bitch, aren't you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Oh you don't, huh? You came to take away all I've worked for and "
"I haven't come to take anything," Tesla gasped.
"Liar!" Buddenbaum said, tightening his hold on her neck.
She reached up to his face and jabbed her finger in his eye, but he wasn't about to let go.
"Me Art's mine," he yelled. "You can't have it! You can't."
She had no breath left to contest her innocence, not much strength to fight him off. The world began to throb to the rhythm of her pulse, pulsing with every heartbeat. She kicked at his legs, hoping she might knock him off his feet, but he seemed to feel nothing, to judge by his unchanging face. He just kept saying: "Mine... Mine... " though his voice, like the whole world, was growing paler and thinner', preparing to disappear completely.
"Don't we know that woman?" somebody said nearby.
"I believe we do," came the reply.
She couldn't turn to see the speakers, but she didn't need to. She knew them by their voices. The leader of the phantoms she'd met in Toothaker's house was here, and not alone. Buddenbaum's face was barely visible now, but just before it flickered out completely she saw him raise his eyes, looking past her at something nearby. He spoke, but the words were white noise. Then there was burst of heat, and a red mark appeared above his fight eye. She squinted hard, trying to make sense of it, but before she could do so his fingers relaxed, and she slipped from his grasp. Her legs were too weak to bear her up. they folded beneath her, and down she went. She drew a breath as she collapsed, and her grateful brain rewarded her with a sliver of comprehension. Buddenbaum had been shot. The mark on his face was a bullet hole.
She didn't have a chance to take satisfaction in the fact. When she struck the ground her thoughts flickered out.
One shot, and the crowd was in turmoil. Cheers turned to screams, laughter to panic. Suddenly people were running in every direction, except towards the gunman and his victim.
D'Amour slipped his gun into his jacket and started towards the middle of the street. The man he'd shot was still standing, despite the blood flooding from his brow, which fact supported the suspicion that there was magic here. Despite the sun, despite the crowds, a suit had been worked and was still being worked, in fact. The closer he got to the place where Tesla was lying, the more his ink itched.
There were other signs, too, that he did his best to keep at bay. The ground under his feet seemed to brighten and shift when he looked at it, as though it was trying to flow towards the middle of the crossroads.
And there was a brightness in the air; gossamer shapes moving across his field of vision, shedding beads of light. There was more here than an invocation, he knew; far more. Reality was soft here, and getting softer. Things meeting, intersecting, trying-perhaps-to flow together.
If so, he had no doubt as to who was masterminding the affair. It was the man he'd just shot, who now, with consummate indifference, had actually turned his back on Harry and was studying the departing crowd.
Harry turned his gaze on Tesla, who was lying quite still. Don't be dead, he said to himself, and almost closing his eyes completely to fend off the blandishments of sky and street he stumbled on towards her.
The avatars were here. Owen knew it. He could feel their eyes upon him, and it was a feeling like no other he knew. Like being spied on by God. Terrible and wonderful at the same time.
He wasn't the only one feeling such confusions, he knew. Though the crowd scattering around him did not possess the knowledge he possessed, they were all of themeven the dullest and the dumbest-sensing something untoward. The shot that had wounded him had wounded them too, in a different fashion: loosed a flood of adrenaline rather than blood, thus alerting their staled senses to signs they would have otherwise missed. He could see the recognition in their faces, wide with awe and terror; he could read it off their trembling lips. It wasn't the way he'd intended things, but he didn't care. Let them gape, he thought. Let them pray. Let them tremble. They'd have to do a lot more of that before this Day of Days was done.
He gave up on looking for the avatars-as long as they were there, what did it matter what shape they'd taken?-and went down on his haunches to touch the ground. Though there was blood running into his right eye, he could see better than he'd seen in his long life. The ground was turning to ether below him, the medallion buried far below him blazing in its bed. He pressed his hand against the ground, and let out a low moan of pleasure as he felt his fingers slip and slide down into the warm asphalt, towards the cross. There were phenomena on every side. Voices speaking out of the ether (revenants, he thought; and why not? The more the merrier), vague, wispy forms riding on the air to left and right of him (too perfect for the past, surely; perhaps the future, coming to find the moment when it ceased to matter), agitations in the ground and sky (he would paint the heavens with stone,' when he remade the world, and make the earth sprout lightning). So much happening, and all because of the object that lay inches from his fingers, the cross that had accrued the power to change the world, buried here at the crossroads.
"You're beautiful," he murmured to it, the way he might have cooed to a pretty boy. "So, so beautiful."
His fingers were almost there. Another foot and a half, no more Erwin had followed Tesla as far as the edge of the crowd, but then-seeing the chaos in front of him-had held back. It was no use trying to speak to her in the midst of such tumult, he'd realized. Better to wait.