Out of the Black - Lee Doty [60]
Passion. Looking at Rae it seemed to flow into him, leaving him both more alive and more uncertain. This was the moment of truth. He threw off the Vision and composed the pattern of Collection. Power began to accumulate around him, drawn to the substance of his will. Soon he was straining to maintain the pattern of his Cast through the pressure of the building energy. He needed dangerous levels of power to make this work over a large enough area.
Ivo had told him that with time and practice he would be able to channel much more power. Once he had seen Ivo in a Cast with enough raw power to kill Alex many times over. But then Ivo was quite a few centuries now without the training wheels. Ivo could Cast dry, though he liked to work with Reggae music in the background. Alex had tried to get to the Loom with Bob Marley once... he didn't see how it helped Ivo. To each his own.
The pressure grew until he felt he would unhinge with it- bone and thought splintering, dispersing into welcoming oblivion. He was at the heart of a whirlwind, but the wind was whirling into him- tearing through him, blinding his mind. His will faltered and his crude Weave began to dissolve. Now or never.
He let the power explode into his clunky weave. The Cast crystallized and blazed before him as it expanded out into the world above. He reeled for an instant in the hollow silence of the departed storm- had he actually pulled it off? Had it fizzled out? For a few ticks of the atomic clock, he was too overwhelmed to care.
Unseen, somewhere in the Overworld, his new Cast shattered. Alex's first indicationwas a shift in the currents of the Underworld- the receding sea before the tsunami. Then the backlash came. It crashed over and through him, an avalanche of light.
Blackness.
***
Ping hit the end of the shelves at a dead run. He crossed the narrow aisle between the stacks of shelves in a wild leap. As he landed on the other side between two closing shelves, he caught a foot on one and went down hard. The fall probably saved his life. He hit the floor awkwardly between the shelves, bruising his shoulder, losing one gun and his wind. He was immediately showered with debris from a barrage that tore through the shelves at chest level. As the shelves moved away again, he blinked and wiped the debris from his face.
A few aisles closer to the exit, he could hear Rae returning fire, a few plinks in the midst of the hailstorm of enemy fire. "Move Rae!" He shouted. "Keep moving..."
A black silhouette appeared in the space between the shelves behind him, weapon at the ready. Someone must have pursued him down the aisle as he fled. His remaining weapon was already twisting toward the attacker, but there was no way he could win this race.
His gun was perhaps twenty degrees off-target when a tidal wave seemed to turn the world inside out. His vision blurred and wavered in the wake of the muted fury. The dying harmonics of an unheard or unremembered explosion rattled the air, lingered in his head. The lights stuttered out, and most blew. Flickering near-darkness returned and silence covered the room.
Unbelievably, the gunman at the end of the shelves hadn't sawed him in half yet. Ping's own weapon came on-target. He pulled the trigger.
Nothing. His ears felt dull, like they were filled with water. His vision still shivered slightly. All the gunfire had stopped; the loudest sound he could hear was his heart, and the rasp of his labored breath.
The gunman was making sharp gestures with his weapon as he repeatedly pulled the trigger with great emphasis. He attempted to clear the bolt while Ping found a more effective use for his own pistol. His thrown needle gun hit the gunman squarely on the forehead with a crack that came as a dull thunk through Ping's watery ears. The gunman dropped like a bag of hammers without even the volition to clutch at his damaged