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perimeter of the clearing, moving sluggishly, its passage evident by the lifting of branches and shivering leaves. Each circuit lasted for a slow count of ten. Strands of Otille's hair plastered against her cheek like whip marks every time the wind blew past; she stared open-mouthed, and Jocundra gave her a reassuring smile, then wondered how she could be so reassuring. A burst of static charges crackled along her neck, the hair of her forearms prickled. The air was chilling rapidly, and despite the humidity, her skin felt parched. With every few revolutions, the force of the wind increased appreciably. Hanks of gray moss were ripped from the branches, leaf storms whirled up, and the wind began to pour over the hilltop, its howl oscillating faster and faster, around and around.

Yet through all this Donnell's clothes hung limp, and he had done nothing more than walk.

The Baron staggered and nearly fell, overbalanced by the camera. Otille helped to brace him, but only for a moment. Then she screamed as the top branch of the largest oak tore loose and sailed away. Jocundra scrambled down into the lee of the hill and peered out over the edge. Donnell was standing on a central junction of the veve, swaying; his hands waved above his head in languid gestures, the gestures of a pagan priest entreating his god. And she remembered the films she had seen of possession rites, the celebrants' feet rooted, their arms waving in these same ecstatic gestures. Otille came crawling down, clutching at her. But Jocundra drew back in fright. Otille's hair was rising into Medusa coils over her head, twisting and snapping. Out of reflex, Jocundra touched her own hair. It eeled away from her fingers. Her blouse belled, as did her jeans, repelled by the fire accumulating on her skin. Otille pointed toward the veve, her face pleading some question. Jocundra followed her point, and this time, as her own scream shattered in her throat unheard, she had no thought of offering reassurance.

Movement, Donnell soon discovered, was the key to operating the veve. The magnetic fields of the copper were blurs of opaque white light, clouds of it, hovering, vanishing, fading into view; they drifted away from his hands whenever he tried to manipulate them. He walked along, trying this and that to no avail, and then realized he had been walking the course directed by the movements of the bacteria. He could feel them more discreetly than ever, more strongly, a warm trickling inside his head. He continued to walk, following a trail inward, and from every junction of the veve but one - and that one, he saw, was to be his destination - a strand of white fire rose, forming into a webwork building up and up around him, a towerlike structure. High above, the milky spectre of the geomagnetic field winked in and out across the sky, and he understood that the complicated flows of the web and his own path were in harmony with it, adapting to its changes. His customary weakness ebbed and he walked faster, causing the structure of the fields to rise higher and become more complex. His new strength acted as a drug, and his thoughts were subsumed by the play of his muscles, the rush of his blood. The fields were singing to him, a reedy insect chorus filling his ears, and he came to know his path as a shaman's dance, an emblem etched upon the floor of the universe by an act both of will and physicality. Then the movements of the bacteria ceased, and he stopped dead center of his predestined junction.

A tower of incendiary wires, intricate as lace, rose around him into the sky, and the geomagnetic field no longer flickered, but was a white road curving from horizon to horizon. It's cold gleam seemed to embody a unity of object and event, being both a destination and a road. Almost tearful, knowing himself unable to reach it yet reaching anyway, like a child trying to touch a star, he lifted his hands to it. The lowest strands of the tower shot toward him and grafted to his fingertips, and at the same time, the geomagnetic field bulged downward, its center fraying into strands that joined with the tower. A flash whitened the sky, and as the light decayed from the outer edges of the flash, it resolved into a latticework of fire, all of its strands flowing inward and pouring down into