Out on the lake, another storm was brewing. Green lightning crackled and lit up the bleached trees.
Crecca was so preoccupied with Cawdor that he didn’t bother to look over his shoulder. Because of that, he missed seeing Jackson pushed ashore by the pod of lungfish. The little stickie crawled out of the shallows on its hands and knees, sputtering and gasping.
“Let’s have a peek at what you’ve got under this,” Crecca said, reaching out and flipping up Ryan’s eye patch.
“Rad blast!” exclaimed the chiller peering over his shoulder.
The carny master grinned. “Now that is what I call—”
A wave of scalding heat slammed Crecca’s back. Then it started to snow spores, and the carny master not only forgot what he was about to say, but he also forgot who he was.
SLOWLY, RYAN BECAME aware of his surroundings. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. It could have been a minute or an hour. But no longer than that because the sun was still high and hot.
He remembered the perfume, and remembering brought a flashback of the amazing sensation it had wrought. An instantaneous, almost orgasmlike disconnect of his normal consciousness, as if sheared away by a blow from a longblade. He recalled drifting upward, joyous, freed of his body and all its restraints.
Though he was certainly back in his body now, some of the detachment remained. He felt like a spectator. And he couldn’t summon up the strength or the desire to fight what was happening to him, to return to the way he was, before the perfume.
Ryan’s head turned, though he had no sense of having willed it.
And couldn’t stop it.
He saw the others around him. Not just his companions, but the carny chillers, too. As his head moved, things appeared to him in a series of freeze-frames. Instead of shadows on faces, he saw bands of beautiful pure colors. Lavender. Blue. Yellow. He wanted to pull his SIG from its holster, but he couldn’t make his hand reach for it. The failed effort was exhausting. He didn’t need the blaster anyway. No one was fighting. Everyone looked dazed and barely able to move.
Dean stood right where Ryan had left him. And the little girl was there, too, by his side. Their eyes were open and blinking. They appeared to be all right. A sound intruded on his thoughts, a banging noise, as if a muffled gong was being struck over and over.
As this was happening, he caught a whiff of a wonderful scent riding on the breeze. Not the flowers’ perfume again, but the aroma of food. Delicious food. Until he smelled it, he hadn’t realized how hungry he was. And then the gnawing ache in his stomach was more than he could bear.
Ryan wasn’t the only one so affected.
Companions and chillers alike roused themselves and began shuffling away from the lake. The violent storms over the water had subsided. The lightning was no more. The low-hanging clouds had vanished. Its surface was a gentle, rippleless mirror of sky.
As Ryan walked beside his son, a hand gripped his shoulder from behind. A weathered hand. Doc stepped up alongside him. Words came out of the old man’s mouth in a language that Ryan didn’t understand. They angered him. He shrugged off the hand.
Ryan, Dean, indeed everyone marched in time to the gong beat echoing up from the ville below. Ryan felt disjointed and clumsy, as if he had great soft pillows for feet Though they were all famished, no one hurried to be first. They all moved at the same rate, which was dictated by the rhythmic banging.
The lake sat on a plateau of sorts. Beyond the mud bank was a long incline of limestone bedrock. Ryan and the others climbed carefully over the moss and tufts of spike grass that rimmed the edges of the deep, crumbling fissures and yawning holes dotting the slope. There was flowing water, too. It seeped steadily from the bottoms of the fissures and the cracks. It was as if the whole face of the hillside leading down to the ville were weeping.
When he and Dean reached the bottom, Ryan ignored the little hamlet. He followed his ears and his nose to the center of the pounded-dirt square, where a black man with dreadlocks was hammering on the side of a fifty-five-gallon steel barrel with a chunk of firewood. As he drummed, he danced, shaking his hips and bobbing the tangled mass of his woolly curls to the backbeat. He had a raging hot fire burning in the barrel, and a metal grate was pulled over the flames.