I shut my eyes, held my breath, refused to smell or taste anything. No good. It was not an experience one could evade.
The woman fleeing. Fleeing. The monstrous beings coming after her.
I heard indrawn breaths. Not from the vision; from reality. There were murmurs of denial in the valley of the omphalos. Shouts of anger. I shut my eyes and made myself listen for sounds from Dinadh. What were the spirit people doing while this went on? The music had stopped. What were they thinking?
Huge, those beings. Great shaggy walls. Shapeless, amorphous, threatening, with dangling tentacles. Now the huge bodies began a new sequence of pictures, a detailed sequence playing over and over and over again:
A place near the ocean. A strangely shaped stone. A twisted tree. The hammered sea sparkling under the sun … A note of … anticipation? And then, all at once, an explosion of shapes from the face of the cliff, like puffs of thick smoke that separated into individual things, a horde of shaggy little floaters, miniature likenesses of the huge Ularians, countless numbers of them, spewing out of crevasses, out of caves, pouring into the sky …
The huge ones sit, unmoving, bands of bright color dancing upon their skins as the little ones fling themselves outward, pursuing the sea-birds, catching them, gulping them down! Oh, they are hungry, so hungry!
And the experience stopped, all at once, like waking from dream. Leelson had shut down the machine. Before me, Poracious Luv wiped her mouth and spat across the fence. Beside me, Lutha and the ex-king did the same. At our feet, Leely, unbothered, still painted upon the fence. He, too, had seen what we had seen. His painting was of them, the little shaggy things that had come pouring from the cliff wall. He had seen but he hadn’t tasted.
Across the pen from me, the three Fastigats stared down toward the temple, waiting. Everywhere in the valley people stood up, shaking, wiping their mouths. Afar, at the openings of the canyons, movement began again, a milky flow made of countless white forms floating from the canyon mouths, streams of them, coming through the tall grasses, converging upon the omphalos.
From somewhere below, a shaky command. Then again, louder, more vehement.
I am lost in anticipation! A drum pulses, trembling. Voices shout. Music resumes, unsteadily, out of tune, out of tempo. The milky streams come nearer.
Kachis! Floating wide-eyed, arms and legs spread wide, only their wings moving them, rivulets of them, becoming rivers, becoming pools, becoming a surrounding, foaming sea! Oh, our people. Oh, our ancestors. Oh, our loved ones. So many! Could there be so many in only one hundred years? And how would I find her in such a mob! Millions of Kachis swirling in creamy eddies, nearing the omphalos, twirling more and more rapidly as they are caught at the edges of the vortex, as their wings …
As their wings rip away! Glassy fragments flying! A sigh from the songfathers assembled, from the spirit people. Was this expected? Was this the way of things? Would they not need their wings in heaven?
Perhaps not, for the Kachis are changing. There is a stripe of darkness up their fronts, from groin to chin. A widening stripe of darkness. At first I don’t understand, then I see what it is. The pale delicate skins have split. Whatever is inside shows dark against the pale integument, thrusting outward, fighting its way out of the tight white casing in which it has been trapped. Arms split from wrist to shoulder, legs split from toe to thigh. Translucent pearly coverings curl away, and what is inside heaves out.
New forms. Different forms. Forms we had just seen, as recorded upon another world, shaggy ravenous hordes of creatures, miniature Ularians …
I hear my own voice howling, no, no, no.
Trompe screams. Why is Trompe screaming? I turn. He is lying beside the fence, blood-covered. Leelson is down behind him, and above them bright ruby lines cut the air into deadly polygons of cross fire, pulses of fire coming from downhill, southwest, and northeast. Someone is firing at them, at us!