“See how the angels come as instruments of retribution and justice!” Shingen-Hu bellowed.
But the priests, undeterred, raised their arms in unison and pointed up toward the platform, their eyes burning in a strange, penetrating fixation that Hunt found instantly unnerving, even at that distance. And then he realized that he was paralyzed. Bolts of fire flew up at him, but VISAR interceded and dissipated them into clouds of sparks. A shimmering curtain seemed to pass between Hunt and the priests, and he found his faculties unfrozen again.
“What the hell was that, VISAR?” he gasped inwardly.
“They got to you. More goes on in this place than is obvious.”
“Well, we can match that act.” Hunt turned and pointed a finger at one of the three piles of fagots heaped around the stakes—the intended victims had made themselves scarce. “Fire.” The pile ignited into a spectacular blaze. A murmur went up from the crowd. Hunt turned back, folded his arms grandiosely, and gazed down at the priests with what he hoped was a look of lordly contempt.
It didn’t faze them. “Pah! Is that the power of your superior gods?” one of them scoffed. “Apprentice angel!” He stepped forward, pointed at the second pile, and duplicated the act. The crowd cheered. Clearly they were rooting for the home team.
“Try this,” Hunt invited, and materialized a white dove out of nowhere, flying above the crowd.
“Puerile.” The priest shot it down with a well-aimed digit of psychic flak. Hunt turned the third pile and its stake into a rosebush surmounted by an apple tree. The priests shredded the lot with an invisible blender. Hunt collapsed the carriage that they had just climbed out of into a heap of parts. They did the same to the platform that he was standing on, and only the speedy intervention of VISAR again saved him and Nixie from joining Agamemnon and his companions, who were still sorting themselves out on the ground.
“They are demons summoned by the false prophets,” the dignitary who seemed to be in charge called to the soldiers. “Slay the heretics.” The soldiers threw aside the horticultural assortment that they were holding and grabbed staffs and clubs proffered by the crowd.
“VISAR, this isn’t working,” Hunt said in a worried voice. “We need something more spectacular.”
“I could take the whole world apart, but what would it leave you to achieve? You’re supposed to be the expert on organic psychology.”
“Bring in the technical consultant.”
Porthik Eesyan appeared alongside Hunt and Nixie, who were standing before the wreckage of the platform and the burning wood. He looked like his Thurien self, but VISAR had arrayed him in ancient Egyptian fashion, with a close-fitting, skirted costume and high, rearward-projecting headpiece that suited the elongated Gany— mean skull. Hunt assumed that he would have been following the events in the same way that Hunt himself had, before his abrupt debut onstage.
“Already the demons are in need of help,” the head priest sneered.
“An interesting predicament,” Eesyan observed to Hunt.
“Save the analysis till later. What do we do about it?”
“You’re going about it the wrong way. Magic is normal here. What you’re doing is impossible, but the people haven’t realized it. To them it’s just a question of degree, not really all that different: the same kind of thing that they’re used to.”
“What would you do, then?”
Eesyan addressed VISAR. “How absolute are the constraints imposed by breakdown of dimensional invariance with velocity?”
“The underlying dynamic of the substrate is optimized to preserve form,” VISAR replied. “The algorithm uses a write-before-erase protocol to afford a redundancy check for accuracy.”
“So a local violation is possible?”
“Sure. I can change the algorithm.”
Then Hunt became aware of Danchekker’s voice speaking inside his head, observing via a coupler on Jevlen and presumably being relayed for Hunt’s benefit, courtesy of VISAR. “I, ah, believe I know just the thing. VISAR, look up your records of Earth for places like Blackpool and Coney Island, would you—you know the kinds of things I mean? I think we could use as elaborate a model as you can devise, with ample gadgetry and mechanisms. They don’t have to do anything functional.”