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"How many bullets have we?" Cassagnac asked.
"-Seven," said Hale.
"Seven," said Elena.
"And seven here as well," said Cassagnac. "Is that good luck? Count carefully as you shoot, and save the last round for yourself." He laughed. "We should be finished here in less than a minute."
Elena was peering forward, over the bow. "The monster is on the far side of the Brandenburg Gate."
"You-shot at it?" Hale asked Cassagnac. "From the lot back there?"
"With a flare-gun," the Frenchman agreed. "A specially manufactured round, an iron cylinder cored from a Shihab meteorite. The DGSS wizards in Algiers believed it contained the death of one of these creatures, and that firing the death into this one would kill this one. It appears they miscalculated-and I wish they were here now."
Hale knew that DGSS was de Gaulle's Direction Generale des Services Speciaux, which had operated out of Algiers during the last two years of the war; and for a moment he wondered what crazy trail had led Elena to employment with them.
The paired posts of several ladders now clunked against the gunwales on both sides, and Hale sprang to the nearest port-side ladder and wrenched it sideways, feeling the resistance-to-leverage of a man's weight on the bottom end of it; Elena and Cassagnac both shot at figures crowding up on the other side, and then Hale and Cassagnac were able to scramble around the gruesomely littered deck and push all the ladders away toward the tapering bow. A couple of shots from the street whipped the rainy air over their hands, but neither of them was hit.
Hale spat out the hot, foul rain. "Elena," he called, "I love you."
"Marcel," she cried with exhausted merriment in return, "I love you too."
"My name is Andrew."
"Andrew, I love you! D'un tumulte!"
Cassagnac was laughing again. "This is the spirit for dying. The captain of a ship can perform marriages-and so I hereby pronounce you two man and wife. Kiss the bride quick, Andrew, before you die."
Hale crawled through the downpour over to where Elena knelt, and dropped his pistol to take her face in her hands and kiss her passionately on the mouth. And her hand was in his hair, pulling him to her, and he tasted the hot blood from her cut lip on his tongue.
Their lips parted, but for several seconds their gazes stayed still linked, to the seeming exclusion of time and the world; but then Elena had turned away to crawl toward Cassagnac, and Hale blinked several times and picked up his pistol with shaking fingers.
Elena was kissing Cassagnac now, and Hale heard them murmuring to each other. Then Elena had abruptly convulsed away from him and scrambled backward until she collided with the mast.
"She's coming back," she called, in a voice that she barely kept from sliding up the scale to a scream.
And she was-the tall wild crown of the whirlwind was stirring the clouds as she surged strongly back toward the east, filling the night sky, glittering in the rain-refracted electric light of headlamps and the searchlight. The inhuman singing battered Hale's eardrums with an emotion to which he could only hold up the inadequate word triumphal. And though his mind and very self were diminished and downcast by the intolerably close imminence of her, and terror was an implosive pressure against his skull, Hale found himself thinking, She walks in Beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies...
- But it was not his thought. Hale was suddenly sure that it was the thought of someone else, someone watching this scene from a vantage point, a safe vantage point!-on the western side of the gate.
He turned away from the terrible looming sight of her, and he forced himself to hold on to one thought as he crawled across the deck to shake Cassagnac's shoulder. "A knife!" he shouted in the man's ear.
Cassagnac just shuddered and did not look away from the advancing whirlwind, but his hand reached into his coat and pulled out a doubleedged commando dagger. Hale took it from him and cut free a foot-and-a-half length of the tangled rope; then, working rapidly with trembling fingers, he stripped long fibers from the remaining rope-end and used them to tie the short length to the crosspiece and pommel of the dagger, in a loop.
The result was an ankh, though the loop was bisected by the dagger's grip. Hale could hear Elena loudly reciting the Ave Maria in Spanish behind him, and he took a deep breath and tried to whisper some syllables of the Latin Pater Noster-and then he gripped the dagger by the base of the blade and stood up, lifting the makeshift ankh over his head-and he had to push the thing up through the air, as if through magnetic resistance.
For an instant all thought and identity were blown out of Hale's head, and his knees sagged and he would have fallen if the ankh had not suddenly been pulling upward in his fist; then the intensity of the thing's surprise was abruptly gone, and Hale was again self-aware, a tiny sentient presumption in the face of something like a god.
He staggered and swung his upraised arm to the left to steady himself-the ankh could only be dragged slowly through the nearly unyielding air, like tugging at a big gyroscope-
- And with a shrill whistling that lashed spray up from the street, the whirlwind leaned over that way, seeming to overbalance the sky. Numbly, Hale flexed all the muscles in his arm and shoulder to force the ankh across the other way, to starboard-and the whirlwind stood up straight against the clouds and then swayed out over the bombed lots to the north.
"What," shouted Cassagnac shrilly to be heard over the wind and the drumming percussion-the man was frowning, and Hale knew what a struggle it was to hold on to a thought here for more than a couple of seconds-"are-you doing?"
"I have an ankh," yelled Hale. "An anchor."
"Give it to me."
Cassagnac struggled to his feet against the wind, and Hale leaned his weight toward him to reach across and press the hilt of the dagger into the man's palm.
