Declare

and so Hale was kneeling too, helplessly, his kneecaps thudding against the pebbled ice. The golden angel was tall, leaning down over them because it would crack the sky if it stood up to its full height—
    If he had not withstood the stressful attention of djinn many times before, Hale’s identity would simply have imploded under the psychic weight, dimly grateful for the escape into oblivion; as it was, he was able to hold on to his diminished self, but the urge to surrender to this nearly divine being, this higher order, was over-whelming. To oppose his will to this force would simply be to shatter his will, shatter his very reason. I will give in to it was his concussed thought; live in the kingdoms in the clouds, learn their secrets, share their power over men—
    But his mouth was suddenly sour with the taste of the imaginary bread he had eaten with the king of Wabar in 1948, and with the taste of the dish he had refused then but had helplessly shared with the djinn in the Ahora Gorge three months later—
    —blood and khaki, the SAS men he had led up to their deaths—
    Hale’s identity recoiled from the memory, and for one teetering moment his self was his own. He hastily made the sign of the cross, clanking the derringer barrel against his snow-goggles as he shouted, “In the name of the Father!” out into air that was incapable now of carrying any merely human voice—and then he pointed the blunt little steel barrel up at the angel—
    And he pulled the trigger.
    Even as he did it, his mind screamed in protesting grief and loss. What you might have had—!
    In slow motion his fist moved up with the recoil, and a churning smear of fire hung in the air. He thought he heard a groaning wail from far behind him—it might have been Mammalian’s voice, Dopplered down to a bass register.
    Slow as a flight of arrows the shot pattern was spreading out as it rushed up into the sky, its pattern rotating to the right as it expanded. The light of the towering figure became the enormous flare of an explosion, but Hale levered back the hammer of the little gun and fired the second shell. Again the shot sped visibly through the billowing air, like an expanding wheel turning.
    Then with a shearing scream the hot shock-wave punched him over backward, and he was sliding north, skating on the barrel of his slung Kalashnikov, toward the edge of the abyss. He was lying on his back, and he spasmodically arched his body to press his weight down onto the crampons laced to his boots. The grating of the points in the ice vibrated in his shinbones, and in seconds he had bumped to a halt against someone’s legs.
    The air was agonizingly shrill with the prolonged whistling scream. Hale’s ribs and legs were being hammered with stony missiles, and his exposed face stung with abrading sand; the lenses of his goggles had been cracked into star-patterns by the blast, and he clawed them off before these ferocious gusts could punch the glass wedges into his eyes.
    He rolled over to protect his face from the flying debris—perhaps an avalanche had crashed down into the grotto, though he couldn’t see why it should keep on bursting this way—and his hand closed on the upright head of an ice-axe imbedded in the ice. Philby had arrested his own slide, and Hale’s too, by unslinging the axe and driving its point into the surface of the frozen lake.
    Balls were rolling and clicking around on the ice by Hale’s hand, and he picked up a golf-ball-sized one and squinted at it in the dimmed daylight—the thing was made of ice, and egg-shaped. It was the shape of djinn death.
    Hale hunched around under the battering rain of ice, and saw that Philby’s face was bloody—one of the flying hailstones had apparently struck him. Hale grabbed the carabiner at Philby’s belt and began tugging him back toward the tumbled stones at the east edge of the lake. But Philby was clinging to the shaft of the ice-axe, and Hale had to get up onto his knees in the shotgun wind and throw his weight onto the shaft to rock it loose from the ice; and when Philby’s anchor had tumbled flat to the ice, unmoored now, Philby turned his goggles toward Hale and then appeared to comprehend Hale’s gestures.
    The two of them began crawling back across the ice. Hale was grateful for the flat surface, because his balance was gone—from moment to moment he felt that the frozen lake was tilting out over the void, or folding in the middle to spill him down into the