Her shredded corpse dropped to the ground and lay twitching.
There was a momentary pause, then drums suddenly boomed from beyond the trees, adding their din to the clamouring storm, which was now directly above the clearing and appeared to be descending toward it.
The witch doctor smeared foul-smelling grease over my skin then rubbed a gritty glasslike powder into it, covering my entire body. A prickling sensation needled into every inch of me, as if I’d become filled with a strong static charge.
“It is ground crystal,” he said. “It will ensure that the gods take you.”
He applied his blade to his own palms, threw the weapon aside, held his hands poised above my face, and began to sing.
His blood dripped into my eyes and onto my lips. Each time I opened my mouth to scream, some of it dropped onto my tongue and oozed to the back of my throat.
God! Please! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!
My church, and the last remnants of my faith, burned.
The air above turned into a writhing ball of energy. It flashed and shimmered, boiled, flattened into a disk, and opened in the middle. Warm air, tangy with the scent of lemons, gusted against my face, then suddenly reversed direction and howled as it was sucked upward. I felt a tremendous force pulling at me.
Clarissa Stark tottered to her feet and screamed my name. She staggered over with her eyes clamped shut and tears streaming from them, and threw herself on top of me.
Iriputiz bellowed, “No! Not you, woman!”
I felt myself rising, carrying Clarissa with me.
My senses left me.
°
3. YATSILL AND YARKEEN
I look back upon the man I was prior to that ritual on Koluwai and I see a pathetic individual. I see a man who professed faith when he felt secure but who had none when he felt threatened.
True faith is steadfast. When mine was tested, it failed instantly and completely.
The Tanner family, the women of Whitechapel, the abominable crimes of Jack the Ripper, and the ghastly ordeal I suffered on the island, these things convinced me that God is a figment of the human imagination, for surely if He existed, He would not allow such iniquities to be visited upon one of His advocates.
So I was born again, a non-believer.
I was born again, under the palest of yellow skies and with a citrus fragrance in my nostrils.
I was born again, and I was lying on my back on the ground.
A voice said, in Koluwaian, “By the Saviour! Look at this one!”
Panicking, petrified, I turned over and scrambled away on my hands and knees. Then I stopped and sucked desperately at the air, my eyes fixed on the grass between my hands. It possessed a peculiar bluish-green hue and its blades were tubular with minuscule white flowers at their tips. I began to tremble all over. A mewl of mortal terror escaped me as my body was consumed by the unendurable agony of the witch doctor’s torture, except—
Except it wasn’t.
The pain was but a memory.
A second voice exclaimed, “Suns! What is it? Look at its colour!”
The first voice: “An aberration?”
“By virtue of there only being two of them, yes, of course. When before have so few been delivered to us?”
“Is the other awake?”
“It is moving.”
I fell onto my side, drew my knees up to my chest, and hugged them. In a quavering whisper, I recited, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy—be thy—”
I swallowed and felt my lips drawing back against my teeth.
The words had emerged as empty sounds. Meaningless. There was no comfort in them. They didn’t alter the fact that it was no longer a stifling tropical night but a bright and fresh day, or that the air smelled not of the jungle but of lemons, or that when I turned my head and blinkingly looked upward, I saw, directly above me through the branches of a pink tree, four small moons in a cloudless cadmium sky—three of dusty red and the fourth, the smallest of the spheres, purple with a dark blemish in its centre.
Four moons.
I broke into hysterical laughter, uncurled, clambered to my feet, and looked around. Pastel colours slid past my eyes. Nonsensical shapes. A bizarre forest. Long shadows.
Plum-coloured fruits, shaped like pears but the size of a man, hung from gargantuan trees. The nearest to me emitted an incomprehensible mumble.
I flinched away from it, turned, and saw Koluwaians standing around me. Koluwaians and . . . other things. One of