Green Eyes

  He had not known his body could encompass such a feeling of power. It was like existing on the boiling edges of a cloud - a place where the borders between the material and immaterial were ceaselessly being redefined - and drawing energy from the transformations. A rapturous strength burned in him. For a moment his eyes were dazzled with whiteness, his consciousness drawn into an involvement of which love and joy, all human emotion, were but fractionated ideals.

  Groggy, he blinked and shook his head and looked around.

  He might have been standing inside a knot tied in a black rope, gazing up through the interstices at sections of a pale purple ceiling. But directly above him, perhaps a hundred feet distant and visible between coils of black wood, was a castle turret. He recognized it as the turret of Ghazes, the disciplinary post of the Yoalo high in the brambly growth of Moselantja. Characters testifying to the public desire for self-abnegation were carved in the teeth of the battlements.

  The apparition of the turret was so unexpected, looming over him like a wave about to crash, that he flung out his right hand in a futile attempt to ward it off. His hand was a negative, featureless black; his fingers shimmered, and gouts of iridescent fire lanced from their tips, merging to a single beam and splashing against the turret, halating it with a rainbow brilliance. He tried to jerk back his hand, but it was locked in position; he wrenched and threw himself in all directions until he sagged from exhaustion, literally hanging by his arm. A few yards away, he made out a fanged door opening into one of the stems, the wall inside furred with lichen that shed a fishbelly phosphorescence. The air stank of ozone, and everything was motionless, soundless.

  But then he heard a sound.

  At first he thought it was speech of a sort, for it had the rhythm and sonority of words pronounced by a leathery tongue. He stared back over his shoulder and saw something bob up in silhouette against the sky, sink behind a stem and rise again. Something awkward and long-winged, with the bulbous body of a fly. Another creature appeared, another, and another yet. There were at least a dozen, all flapping lazily toward him through the maze of stems.

  Once more, this time choking with fear, he tried to wrench himself free. Fire still lanced from his fingertips. The radiance about the turret was pulsing, and the turret itself rippled. Then, berating himself for stupidity, he remembered how to disengage the weapon capacity of the suit. He formed his hand into a claw so that the five beams splashed into each other and slowly brought his fingers together until they met.

  The foremost of the beasts cleared the stem beyond his, its face a horror of white-rimmed eyes, an ape’s flat nose, needle teeth, tendrils flapping from its lips. It beat its wings, gaining altitude for a dive, and he caught a whiff of fetor and a glimpse of its scabbed underbelly. He crouched down, but a wing buffeted the side of his head and sent him reeling to the edge of the stem. As he teetered, he saw below a puzzle of purple gleam and shadow and interlocking stems. Falling, he clawed at the air and felt a tension on his fingertips.

  His fall should have been endless. He should have caromed off the infinity of stems beneath, being battered into shapelessness and blood. But he fell only a couple of feet through a burst of white glory and landed on his side. Dazed, he rolled onto his back. Overhead, slung like a sagging hammock, the crescent moon held sway amid the pinprick stars of a Louisiana night.

  The wind shredded Jocundra’s scream. From Donnell’s fingers a stream of numinous energy, the ghost of a beam, lanced towards the top of the cypress tree. He was struggling as if his arm were gripped by a transparent vise, throwing himself backward, panicked. She started crawling down the hill, but the wind knocked her flat. Crumpled wrappers, tin cans, bottles and twigs skittered along the ground, all shining with coronas; the air was full of stinging grit. Something smacked against her cheek, clung for a second with sticky claws, dropped down into her blouse and walked across her breasts. She rolled over, beating at her chest until a half-crushed cricket fell out and flipped away in the wind, leaving a wet smear on her belly. She looked up just as Donnell toppled off the veve, and as the cypress top, surrounded by a halo of ghostly radiance, exploded.

  At least it began as an explosion.