time since. With a single word, he pointed at the concrete floor of the parking garage, and a cloud of fine chips of rubble flew upward in a perfect circle as the old man’s will dug a trench two inches deep and four across in the obdurate flooring.
Three of the hounds hit him, one second motionless, the next moving like serpents guided by some singular, terrible will. The old man swatted one of them away with an upward blow of his staff and a detonation of kinetic energy that slammed the Outsider into the concrete ceiling and brought it back down in a shower of rubble from the impact. The second hit him square in the chest with outstretched talons, and there was a humming snap of expanding energy that sounded like a bug zapper the size of a Tesla coil. It recoiled from the old man, claws burned black. But the third cornerhound hit him in one leg, and while the old man’s shield protected him from the impact, the natural consequences of Newton’s First Law and having one leg slammed out abruptly from beneath him were harder on the old man. He went down with a gasp as another trio of cornerhounds blurred to within striking range at the base of the column.
The Outsiders closed on my grandfather, talons and tentacles tearing. Flashes of light, humming howls of electricity, the stench of charred flesh, and basso moans filled the air as the old man fought them, his body encased in armor of pure will that made my own defensive spells seem crude and primitive by comparison.
I sprinted to help him, and as I did, I felt the plummeting tone of a subsonic roar hit my back, a sensation weirdly like that of a low-pressure stream of water.
One second I was moving fine. The next I was staggering, the entire garage a sudden blur. My guts had turned to water, my knees to jelly. It was everything I could do to get a hand on the ground and shift to a modified three-point gait, in order to keep from simply falling over and spilling the bucket and its contents everywhere. As I moved forward, the ground kept rotating counterclockwise, no matter how much my rational brain insisted that couldn’t be happening—my inner ears weren’t having it.
Behind me, the hounds came forward in sudden streaks of oily speed.
I gollumed across the lower end of the circle the old man had cut in the floor around him, with the hounds in full pursuit—and two more flying toward me from the circle’s upper end. They were already in midleap.
From the floor, from beneath a mound of foes, the old man shouted and a burst of wind suddenly swept up from the floor. It caught the two hounds with exactly enough force to lift them over my head and past me, sending them crashing into the pack pursuing me, briefly disrupting their advance.
And the old man did that from a under a pile of nine more of the things trying to seize him with their tentacles and tear him into quarters.
That is a wizard, people.
I covered the rest of the ground toward the uphill end of Ebenezar’s circle. I couldn’t have dropped the gas into the circle at its lower end. Gravity wouldn’t have been our friend. But I got to the uphill side of the circle and poured out the gasoline as quickly as I could without sloshing it out of the little trench in the concrete.
One of the cornerhounds let out an ululating cry, the sound distressed, and half the creatures atop Ebenezar peeled off him and flung themselves at me.
The cornerhounds probably should have thought their way through taking pressure off a man of my grandfather’s skills. A shouted word sent a burst of flame roaring out from the surface of his body in an expanding Ebenezar-shaped wave of blue-white fire, and the cornerhounds around him recoiled. The old man slammed his right palm on the earth, growling a low phrase, and gravity suddenly increased around the hounds coming toward me, dragging them to earth as they fought in vain against the weight of their own bodies.
The hounds on Ebenezar recovered from the blast of flame and threw themselves onto him again. Now he couldn’t fight back—not and hold the hounds coming toward me, anyway.
The Outsiders went at him, and there was another light show as the old man’s personal defenses resisted and spat sparks of defiance back at them.