Declare

seconds before his ribs tingled like a mouthful of bubbling champagne.
    Nothing was pushing up from below the surface. The surface of the pool had clenched , in defiance of gravity, into gleaming folds and hollows, like the consistent standing shapes in a boat’s wake; and the glassy ridges and depressions were moving, slowly and laboriously, sometimes shattering into explosive spray but more often holding their shapes. Curling streaks of tan silt rushed like pale flames across the gleaming black surfaces.
    Two parallel ridges of water, ten feet long and tapered at the ends, flexed into symmetrical contours, and Hale thought they now resembled vast lips; beyond the ends and behind them, two upswelling domes suddenly seemed to be yard-wide bulbous eyes. Webs of silt flowed over the domes like eyelid membranes; the whole surface of the pool had swollen into a gleaming mound and now looked something like a blind amphibian head.
    It was hard to grasp the scale of the pool—surface tension couldn’t hold this volume of any liquid in this shape, and Hale’s optic nerves apparently supposed that some magnification was going on—his vision kept blurring and he had to keep refocusing on the thing.
    After a moment the eye hemispheres cleared of silt and were glistening black orbs, while turbulent whirls of sand still clouded the rest of the monstrously bulging pool. The eyes had nothing like irises, but there was focused attention, if not intelligence, in the gaze that was directed straight across thirty feet of heated air at Hale and Ishmael.
    The faltering breeze from the pool was not only hot, but damp. The pool’s convoluted surface was steaming now, at least in the twenty-foot quadrant between the huge lips and the sand slope below Hale’s camel, and among the foggy wisps Hale could see that in the instant of its first appearance each puff of steam was a perfect ring, too brief to glimpse unless he happened to be staring at the right spot at the moment when one of them sizzled. Most of the flashbulb-quick rings were as small as coins, but some were as big as steering wheels, and a few were just segments of circles that would have been wider than radar dishes. The water was hissing and popping, and now a counterclockwise breeze had started up around the pool, raising a haze of sand.
    Hale stared back at the blank face sculpted on the steaming and uncollapsing water out there. He didn’t flinch, for he had been up close to this sort of creature before, but he was suddenly so dizzy that he wanted to jump down from the saddle and fall to his knees for sheer steadiness: the mere fact of this phenomenon was so incongruous and wrong that the landscape around it seemed to fade to a colorless two-dimensional sheet, with no reliable horizontal.
    Ishmael muttered, “ Ikh! Khrr, khrr ,” to his camel and tapped her neck with his stick, and the mare obediently folded down onto her knees, lowered her hindquarters to the sand, and then shuffled her knees forward until she was sitting as comfortably as a big cat. Clearly nothing so far had struck the beast as alarming. Look to dogs, camels don’t react.
    Hale’s mount too was calm, and sat down with a leisurely shifting of weight when he had tapped her neck and huskily given her the “ Khrr, khrr ” command.
    Ishmael stepped down from the saddle to the sand. His hand brushed the rifle stock that swung by his hip, but he left the weapon slung over his shoulder.
    Hale noted the instinctive gesture and bared his teeth behind the flap of his kaffiyeh . The rifle could be of no use against something made of water and wind. The makeshift tinfoil ankh would have been a comfort—but he told himself that this djinn was apparently confined to this water, and probably diminished in power.
    Ishmael had plodded several steps down the sand slope from the crest, and his robe was suddenly flapping as he stepped into the localized whirlwind. He scowled back over his shoulder at Hale. “Come over here!” he snapped in Arabic.
    Hale took a deep breath. “Aye aye,” he said hoarsely in English, boosting himself down from his saddle. The crusty sand was jagged under the soles of his bare feet, and he walked carefully down the slope to halt beside the old man. He was squinting now against the flying sand.
    With a crash that almost made him jump back, the crudely formed eyes and lips broke apart into spray like wave-tops sheared by a gale, and for several seconds the space for ten feet above