"You really are most persistent."
I spun at the words to see Shu stepping out from behind a bank of shelving. He had a look of curiosity on his face. There were three or four forms moving behind him, hiding in shadow; he gestured once, holding them back. I retreated to the side of the work table near the door. He stopped on the other side of it, just outside the pool of light from the lamps.
I stroked the table again. "This is pretty solid." It was, too; thick metal sides reached down from the work surface. The piece didn't move when I pushed at it experimentally; it was either mounted to the floor or contained enough mass in its cabinetry to anchor it firmly.
Shu waved his arm over it. "That has no bearing on me." He stepped forward into the table, his torso protruding from it, then stepped back. "It cannot protect you from me, even without my servants." A gesture back at the sylphs gathered behind him.
"No, you're right," I said. I lowered the gun, and pushed it into my coat to holster it. Shu looked satisfied. I fumbled with my left hand for a moment under the coat, anchoring the gun, then straightened and looked at him. "But it can protect me from this."
With that, I flipped the stun grenade I'd armed over the table and then fell flat to the floor behind it.
Elder Gods may be damn near omnipotent, but there are rules. They have to
know
what their power will be doing; they have to
use
them. The exception is those passive abilities linked to their personification. Malsumis stopped bullets like a tree; Baba Yaga shifted forms, changeable witch. Shu, though ... Shu, I was guessing, was indeed a God of the Air. One who hadn't had to seriously deal with a threat to his body in a good long time.
There was a metallic
clonk
as the grenade's mechanism hit the table or the floor across the table from me. I was just starting to wonder if Shu was going to have time to get back, and my hands had just touched the thong at my chest to maintain a conduit to the Water of Life within, when the grenade went off.
Bang
.
It's such a small word, but in this case it applied; my hearing vanished almost immediately, leaving only that initial slap of sound. I felt my head bounce on the floor, and despite my eyes being squeezed shut a wall of light pushed through my eyelids. The table's frame absorbed nearly all the grenade's force, though, directing it away from me and towards Shu and his sylphs.
I forced myself to stand up. I had to blink several times to get my eyes to stay open, and my ears were producing nothing except a faint ringing, stunned to silence. I pressed my chest, harder, and there was a sudden flare of pain as life energy flowed into me from the vial, accelerating my recovery.
Shu was standing perhaps fifteen feet from the table. His form was indistinct, and there was a determined expression on his face. As I watched, pulling myself up from the floor, he gritted his teeth and solidified his edges a little more. I had the Desert Eagle out. I shouted at him, despite being unable to hear myself, "Hey, you think there's any metal dust in the air in here?"
He looked at me, confusion and anger warring, and then I leveled the Desert Eagle and fired it at his head. The first round sang from the gun, and I reached out with my will. There was a faint echo of resonance from a corner of the room, and I grinned as the first bullet dropped to the ground between us, its energy spent in the searching 'cast. Shu stepped towards me as I turned and ran for the echo. I didn't spare him more than a glance; the sylphs were nowhere in sight, likely still struggling to reform after the shockwave of the grenade tore their masses into stray air currents and blasted them violently around the room. There was the smell of cordite.
The fading pulse of force led me to a shelf near the wall. I tore random objects off it until there, at the back, was a familiar strip of leather. I had just time to hook it, clumsily, around myself and over my coat, before Shu staggered into the aisle. He was firming up, but still his outline wavered slightly, and there was an expression of mostly anger on his face now as he finished regaining control of his form. He spoke, threats or promises, I couldn't tell. I just shook my head and pointed at my ear.
He was perhaps ten feet away when I leveled the Desert Eagle and fired a round at his head. He ignored it. The second bullet left the gun and I stole its energy, feeling the pocket watch in the bandolier pulse; then the third took flight and I poured the energy into its small shape. Azif had touched it; I touched it. No longer lead, pressed instead into samarium-cobalt, the jacketed magnet spun towards Shu and as my 'cast touched it, it flared hard in electromagnetics. Metal dust, swirling in the air from the grenade blast where it had been left after being torn from the crevices, crannies and nooks of the shop's floor and tools, formed a sudden shape in its path. Trailing a net of metal much as an aircraft trails its sonic boom, the bullet passed through Shu's head.
He wasn't ready for that. The fan of metal dust, held there by unnaturally strong force, ripped the airspace of his head apart again. I watched his features disperse into a cloud of tan color then slowly start to wash back. He stopped and went to his knees, apparently overtaken with the amount of concentration required to cope. I kneeled in front of him, waiting.
As soon as I could see his eyes again, and watched them focus on my face, I nodded and brought up the gun again. He stumbled back and raised a hand, but I fired anyway. Twice. His head and a section of his shoulder atomized. I used the time to search the shelves near where I’d found the bandolier and came up with all three of my guns, still in holsters. I quickly stuffed them into pockets.
Then I squatted down and waited some more, reflecting that I'd actually heard the last two shots, which meant my hearing wasn't permanently gone. When Shu had gained back most of his head, I raised the Desert Eagle to aim again. He finished collecting himself, eyes burning with fury, but made no move other than to straighten to a standing position. I rose with him, the gun between us. When he was (as far as I could tell) completely solid, I waggled the gun at him. "This can't kill you, but it can make you damned uncomfortable. Your buddies still haven't figured out how to get back yet. Care to admit that I can piss in your pool for, oh, I dunno, several hours?"
Hatred. He nodded, fists clenching. I waggled the gun again. "Good. Here's how it's going to be. I'm walking back out of here with my tools." I patted the bandolier. "You're not going to follow me. Neither are your little friends. If I see any of you, I'm going to do what I just did to you, again. With a twist." I pulled a pouch out of my coat pocket, and before Shu could move I threw a handful of dust over him. "That's metal. Really fine powder. For as long as you stay semisolid, it's going to stay embedded in whatever you're using for substance. Only by completely dispersing will you be rid of it."
"Do you think powder will discommode me?"
"Yeah, I do. See, because while you have that stuff in you, and I'm using magnetic bullets-" I fired again. This time, the bullet tore through Shu's forearm and took a huge chunk of substance with it, slamming it into the wall behind him to disperse into gas. Shu screamed, an inarticulate sound, and clenched his other hand to the hole in his arm.
I reloaded while he was occupied. "Hurts, doesn't it? Let me tell you what else, fucker. I had a little talk with some people. Remember my
GRANDMOTHER
?" I was screaming by the end, the gun in his face. Shu had gone still. He nodded, once, carefully. I drew back. "Good. Then perhaps you'll remember her when she was younger?" He nodded again, still not moving much. "Then remember this, Shu." I walked backwards towards the door. When I reached it, I opened it behind me without looking, and holstered the gun. He stood in the workshop, watching. There was a slight disturbance around him which I gathered to be the sylphs attempting to congeal.
"How long do you think it'd take you to reconstitute if your current self was anchored to individual particles buried in the walls?"
He glared at me. That was the answer I needed. "Well, good."
I flipped the second stun grenade at him and slipped out, closing the door behind me and leaning against the wall. Something hit the door once, a half-hearted impact, and then there was another incredibly loud noise. I sagged, mouth open to reduce the shock, and then walked through the sudden howl of fire alarms to the stairs.
When I left the building and headed uptown towards home, I passed ten or twenty firefighters rushing in past me. They didn't give me a second look. I pictured them flooding the workshop with water and grinned at the thought of Shu washing down that drain in a myriad tiny particles, god of the Air sluiced into the realm of water.
On the way, I stopped three times in front of three different statues. Their outlines were wavering slightly, sylphs holding form around them. In front of each, I pulled the Desert Eagle and leveled it until the wavering subsided. I grinned again, once, at each.
Then I went home.
Part 3
On Earth and Fire
I
There was a man who lived a life of fire
* * *
At 8th Avenue and Horatio there is a jagged weal in the grid system of Manhattan. The angled streets of the West Village meet wandering Greenwich Avenue and the bottom end of orderly Chelsea directly above. Tucked away on 8th and bounded by Horatio Street, 13th Street and West 4th St (I said it was jagged, it also defies logic) is that rarity of sightings: a Manhattan gas station. Taxicabs are frequent custom here; a line of yellow cabs is usually to be found idling at the curb awaiting their turn to sup.
The taxicabs had all gone, flushed away as the skittish plovers they were, for their small urban feeder was an inferno.
I stood across 8th Avenue inside the small triangular park that lay almost directly opposite. 8th was blocked by haphazardly parked fire engines, marshal's vehicles, police cruisers and the lethal humping snakes of live fire hoses feeding from the hydrants that pulse invisibly on New York's streets. A tanker truck had gone up while delivering fuel to the small independent station, and due to the station being surrounded on three sides by residential buildings the fire department was making a concerted effort to contain the blaze within the station itself. The only reason they looked like having a chance in hell was that the tanker had been parked as far from the back of the station as possible, essentially on the sidewalk, and the fire was (so far) limited to the underground tanks beneath it, the pumps themselves and the tanker's corpse, which hadn't moved.
Apparently the tanker had been full. This was bad as far as extinguishing the blaze went, but good in that there hadn't been a vapor-backed explosion; rather, it appeared that the transfer hose had somehow ignited, caused a slow and steady ignition rather than a detonation. This, too, meant the flames were for the moment contained within a thick barrier of foam the
pompiers
had placed around the site, maintaining it with grim determination. Burning fuel slid under the foam walls and promptly extinguished, and a second team was playing sprayers over the rivers of gasoline that emerged from beneath the gigantic bubble-bath in order to keep the air above it cool and keep it from igniting. There were two trucks of HAZMAT crews trying with some success to keep the fossil fuels from running into the storm sewers, liberally dispensing bentonite to absorb and block the flows. The entire area reeked of smoke and fuel. Since this was New York, the watching crowd had swelled to somewhat ludicrous levels, and pulled in all the street vendors from perhaps thirty blocks around. New Yorkers love a show. Occasional bursts of activity by the emergency services crews would prompt spatters of cheers, only a few of them sarcastic.
I had been on my way home from the A/C/E stop at 14th and 8th, happening by only a few minutes after the initial blast. I hadn't seen that, but upon exiting the subway I'd seen (and heard) the conflagration and had, like my fellow city dwellers, hastened to get a good spot. I'd had two hot dogs (one good, one foul) a falafel (quite good) and two pieces of fruit from the enterprising types with carts. I'd spent a few minutes scanning the scene and the crowd looking for any indication that there was Elder presence or involvement in the fire, and seen none; there were a couple of sylphs watching from a hundred feet back or so, but I'd seen them arrive after the fact. They'd nodded to me warily and I'd nodded back, our personal differences suspended in New York truce. They had been quietly watching the sights wrapped into and around a pair of trees at the back of the park. The slightly wavy outlines of the trunks where they were interposed, some fifteen feet up, was almost indistinguishable even to my sight, so I had no fear they would be seen by anyone.
As I turned to head downtown towards home (resigning myself to a detour away from Eighth due to safety barriers) my eyes came to rest on man crouched atop a newspaper vending box. It was his posture that arrested me, I'm fairly sure; he was
poised
, his feet together underneath him with his bent legs splayed out, hands resting not on his knees but on the newspaper box's surface. With his slight forward lean and intent stare, he looked almost like a sprinter in the blocks. I frowned and angled to walk past him. Other than his stance, he seemed perfectly normal, and mere pyromania - no matter how severe - couldn't serve to mark him as odd in this crowd.
After I passed the newspaper box, though, I turned to look at him again. With the fire behind him, silhouetting him, the story was entirely different, causing me to stop and move instinctively to the building wall for a better look. He was still in the same pose, but around his body was a wavering brightness. On examination, it looked as though the light from the fire was being lensed around his body, compressed into bands of high intensity near his outline. A man-shaped bonfire, optical illusion, roared up from the vending machine into the New York skyline, merging with the light reflected from the surrounding buildings.