My tissues knitted as I plunged to meet him. I got past the bayonet and gun muzzle, hitting him hard enough to knock the weapon loose but not to bowl him over. He braced his legs, grabbed my neck, and hung on.
I swung my left hind leg back of his ankle and shoved. He fell with me on top, the position an infighting werewolf always tries for. My head swiveled; I gashed open his arm and broke his grip.
Before I could settle the business, three others had piled on me. Their trench scimitars went up and down, in between my ribs and out again. Lousy training they’d had. I snapped my way free of the heap-half a dozen by then?and broke loose.
Through sweat and blood I caught the faintest whiff of Chanel No. 5, and something in me laughed. Virginia had sped past the confusion?riding her stick a foot above ground, and was inside Trollburg. My next task was to lead a chase and not stop a silver slug while doing so.
I howled, to taunt the men spilling from outlying houses, and let them have a good look at me before making off across the fields. My pace was easy, not to lose them at once; I relied on zigzags to keep me unpunctured. They followed, stumbling and shouting.
As far as they knew, this had been a mere commando raid. Their pickets would have re‑formed and the whole garrison been alerted. But surely none except a few chosen officers knew about the afreet, and none of those knew we’d acquired the information. So they had no way of telling what we really planned. Maybe we would pull this operation off?
Something swooped overhead, one of their damned carpets. It rushed down on me like a hawk, guns spitting. I made for the nearest patch of woods.
Into the trees! Given half a break, I could?
They didn’t give it. I heard a bounding behind me, caught the acrid smell, and whimpered. A weretiger could go as fast as I.
For a moment I remembered an old guide I’d had in Alaska, and wished to blazes he were here. He was a were‑Kodiak bear. Then I whirled and met the tiger before he could pounce.
He was a big one, five hundred pounds at least. His eyes smoldered above the great fangs, and he lifted a paw that could crack my spine like a dry twig. I rushed in, snapping, and danced back before he could strike.
Part of me heard the enemy, blundering around in the underbrush trying to find us. The tiger leaped. I evaded him and bolted for the nearest thicket. Maybe I could go where he couldn’t. He ramped through the woods behind me, roaring.
I saw a narrow space between a pair of giant oaks, too small for him, and hurried that way. But it was too small for me also. In the half second that I was stuck, he caught up. The lights exploded and went out.
IV
I WAS NOWHERE and nowhen. My very body had departed from me, or I from it. How could I think of infinite eternal dark and cold and emptiness when I had no senses? How could I despair when I was nothing but a point in spacetime? . . . No, not even that, for there was nothing else, nothing to find or love or hate or fear or be related to in any way whatsoever. The dead were less alone than I, for I was all which existed.
This was my despair.
But on the instant, or after a quadrillion years, or both or neither, I came to know otherwise. I was under the regard of the Solipsist. Helpless in unconsciousness, I could but share that egotism so ultimate that it would yield no room even to hope. I swirled in the tides and storms of thoughts too remote, too alien, too vast for me to take in save as I might brokenly hear the polar ocean while it drowned me.
?danger, this one‑he and those two‑somehow they can. be a terrible danger‑not now (scornfully) when they merely help complete the ruin of a plan already bungled into wreck‑no, later, when the next plan is ripening, the great one of which this war was naught but an early leaf?something about them warns thinly of danger?could I only scan more clearly into time they must be diverted, destroyed, somehow dealt with before their potential has grown?but I cannot originate anything yet?maybe they will be slain by the normal chances of war?if not, I must remember them and try later?now I have too much else to do, saving those seeds I planted in the world?the birds of the enemy fly thick across my fields, hungry crows and eagles to guard them‑(with ever wilder hate) my snares shall take you yet, birds‑and the One Who loosed you!