primroses while the enormous centipede’s head slithered left and right and rolled toward me at a truly alarming rate.
Its enormous eyes glittered brightly, and slime dripped from its hungrily snapping jaws. Its hundreds of legs each dug into the ground to propel its weight forward, their tips like tent stakes, biting the earth. It sounded almost like a freaking locomotive.
I looked from the centipede down to the skull. “I told you so!” I screamed. “Way! Too! Easy!”
12
Yeah.
This was not what I’d had in mind when I got out of bed that morning.
The damned thing should have been slow. By every law of physics, by every right, a centipede that big should have been slow. Dinosauric. Elephantine.
But this was the Nevernever. You didn’t play by the same rules here. Physics were sort of a guideline, and a very loose and elastic guideline at that. Here, the mind and heart had more sway than the material, and the big bug was fast. That enormous, predatory head shot at me like the engine of some psychotic locomotive, its killer jaws spreading wide.
Fortunately for me, I was, just barely, faster.
I brought forth my left hand, holding it out palm forth in a gesture of command and denial, a universal pose meaning one thing: Stop! Intent was important in this place. As the jaws closed, I brought up my spherical shield to meet it, the energy humming through my bracelet’s charms, which burst into shining light as the magic coursing through them shone through the ephemeral substance of mere material metals.
The jaws closed with a crunch and a crash, and my bracelet flared even brighter. The shield exploded in more colors and shapes than a company of kaleidoscopes, and turned aside the beast’s jaws—its strength, after all, was just one more bit of materially oriented power in an immaterial realm.
I brought my right hand out of my coat holding my blasting rod, and with a shouted word loosed a sledgehammer of searing power. It dipped down and then curled up an instant before it hit, landing a sorcerous uppercut on what passed for the centipede’s chin. It flung the creature’s head several yards up, and its entire body rippled in agony.
Which, in retrospect, probably shouldn’t have caught me quite as off guard as it did.
The ground beneath my feet heaved and bucked, and I went flying, my arms whirling in a useless windmill. I landed in a sprawl amid ranks of primroses, which immediately began to move, lashing out with tiny stem-tendrils lined with wickedly sharp little thorns. Even as I struggled back to my feet, tearing them away from my wrists and ankles, I noticed that the flowers around me had begun to blush a deep bloodred.
“You know what, Harry!” Bob called. “I don’t think this is a garden at all!”
“Genius,” I muttered, as the centipede recovered its balance and began reorienting itself to attack. Its body flowed forward, following the motion of its head. I decided that all those legs hitting the earth like posthole diggers in steady sequence made the giant bug sound less like a locomotive than a big piece of farm equipment churning by.
I ran at it, focusing my will beneath me, planted my staff on the earth, and swung my legs up in a pole vaulter’s leap. I unleashed my will beneath and behind me as I did, and flew over the thing’s back as it continued surging forward. It let out a rumbling sound of displeasure as I went, the head twisting to follow me, forced to slow down enough to allow its own rearmost legs to get out of its way. It bought me only a few seconds.
Bigger doesn’t mean better, especially in the Nevernever. One second was time enough to turn, focus another beam of fire into a far smaller area, and bring it down like an enormous cutting torch almost precisely across the middle of the big bug’s body, an act of precision magic that I’d learned from Luccio, and which I was not at all confident I could have duplicated in the real world.
The beam, no bigger around than a couple of my fingers, sliced the creature in half as neatly and simply as if I’d used a paper cutter the size of a semi trailer.
It shrieked in pain, a brazen, bellowing sound that conveyed, even from such an alien thing, the depth of its physical agony. Its hindquarters just kept right on rolling forward, as if they hadn’t noticed that the head was