I said, "The ring's broken. Maybe I can try to fix it. Who had it last?"
Colin groaned muddily. "It's all going away."
"What?" I said.
"The dream of the world. All going away..."
Victor said, "It's on his finger."
Foolish of me. There it was. It had a controlling monad, just like a living being. The monad had been forced out of alignment by an Amazonian azure ray, and the internal nature of the ring had turned into something materialistic, dull, and inert.
I twisted the monad back into shape, but the internal nature of the ring did not change. Mending the break in a glass after the water had run out.
"Nothing's happening," I said.
Victor said, "Can you reproduce the effect Miss Daw used to propel you out of the fourth dimension? I've neutralized all energy flows in this area; he should not be able to track us, either by magic or by electronics-"
"Wait! I see something!"
"Report."
"It's the corpse. The giant whatever-it-is inside the hollow horse coffin. The genie in the ring, do you know who I mean?"
Victor said, "The icon representing the ring of Gyges."
"He says there is an object in our future. No one can defeat the God of Speed in a race; no one can outrun him. It's fate."
Vanity said, "Don't listen to him! He's lying! Don't believe it."
I looked at Vanity. She was kneeling, cradling Quentin in her arms. Quentin stirred and moaned feebly. He was not dead.
She said, "Dead people work for the bad guy, remember? The guy with the keys to the underworld?"
Victor said, "Amelia, what were the four steps needed for us to undo an Olympian decree of fate?"
I said, "It is complex, but I can sum it up: Each of us has a part to play. First, I am supposed to give the destiny enough free will to allow it to be changed.
"Second, a destiny is a curse. It uses sympathy and contagion to organize the spirits of the universe to want a certain outcome. To annul that requires magic: Quentin's paradigm.
"Third, a destiny is fixed and inescapable, as dispassionate as a law of nature. That's you. I think you take away the free will I give the destiny-force, so that it acts according to a mechanistic cause and effect.
"I was told that finally, a psychic event of a type and kind unknown must take place at the final step to make it permanent. Unknown to my people! My sister Circe has a blind spot, because of her paradigm: She didn't know what Colin's role was supposed to be." I swallowed. "I volun-teered, you know. It was to get that message through that I came into this world, and suffered all this, and met you."
Vanity cut in impatiently, "Do we need that last part? Do we care if it is permanent or not, at this point? If we just temporarily made it possible to outrun Trismegistus, then we could outrun him, right?"
I said to Victor, "There was one thing more: Time-space must be arranged to permit the laws of nature under which these four events may take place. That sounds like a Vanity thing to me."
Victor said to me, "How close is he to overtaking us?"
I looked back. I saw the fourth-dimensional shape of Trismegistus, but he was not behind us, not anymore. He was ahead of us.
I saw an explosion in the fourth dimension, another clash caused by the violent intersection of two mutually contradictory laws of nature. Trismegistus had seized the segment of dream-space through which our elevator shaft was running, and shoved it into the middle of downtown Los Angeles, back on the material plane, Earth. All our running: We had run in a circle, like some wounded game creature.
A flux of crooked morality strands, charged and infused with magic, was issuing contradictory orders to the matter and energy in the area. Nothing knew what the laws of nature were any longer; it was another dream-storm, exploding like a bomb beneath our feet.
At the same time, the line of energy I was using to probe him stiffened with a force of some unknown purport. One of his serpents reared up from his wand, opened its fanged mouth. Musical tension, similar to a siren song, flickered from the snake-mouth, flashed backwards along the strand, and struck me in the face. Musical snake venom in my eyes.
There was a sensation of fire in my eyes, pain. My eyes were filled with tears, but I could still see.
Dimly.
It was getting dimmer. I was going blind.
I screamed, "Vanity, get us out of here! He's ahead of us!"
Victor said, "Belay that, Vanity. Create the laws of nature needed to dispel a destiny. There is no point in running."
I was thrown to the ground as the platform came to an abrupt halt. Things to me were half-lit, monochromatic. We were in a green house. The deck to either side of us was spread with wide lawns and jeweled statues, and ornamental gardens in terraces climbed up the sloping wooden hull. The portholes here were like the windows of a cathedraclass="underline" a massive rose-window at one end, hazed in rainbows, stained-glass arches marching like sentries away from it.
The green stone around Vanity's neck flickered and went dim. Vanity said, "We are surrounded by chaos, Leader! I cannot back us out of here."
Victor issued a weft of magnetic force that carried him over to the nearest stained-glass window.
Without flinching, he shoved his arm through the window, cutting himself badly on the shards. A black fluid squirted from his veins, falling into whatever cloudscape or seascape was beyond the window. I could not see the scene clearly. It was something that billowed.
A beam swept from his eye and ignited the black substance. A bluish flame started up and began to get brighter through the window.
Victor said, "I can try to stabilize the immediate area. Do you have the laws of nature we want?"
Vanity said, "I wished for what you told me to wish for. Is Quentin going to be okay?"
A voice came out of my cell phone. It came out of Vanity's pocket and Quentin's and Colin's coat as well, where they kept their cell phones. I assume Victor could simply hear it.
"Checkmate," came the light, quick, playful voice of Trismegistus.
He continued: "The laws of nature that allow one to unweave a destiny are the same ones, the exact same ones, that allow destinies to be sewn up in the first place. The air of Olympos, so to speak. Our home field advantage. The laws least favorable to Chaos and your powers. A dead zone. Apt expression, eh? Very apt?