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surprised to find that he had made it long ago and that the sight of the two
men, walking side by side, had only confirmed the judgment. He, the arrow, now
perceived the end of his journey. Readiness filled him like fire.
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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind
A few days before he had lain in the tunnel, gathering power, making of
himself a spring with its focus at the blade, becoming in the end the blade
itself moving, a rushing and a light. Now he felt himself gathering in another
way, toward another end.
Though he could not touch it, felt it only as a weight under his arm, he was
becoming the pistol, the cocked mechanism, the bullets... potential violence
in self-consuming casings.
De Prey and Curzon split at the second intersection, de Prey and the gray man
going right, Curzon and the two guards left.
Steward hadn t expected that, but he didn t quicken his pace. He could work
with this. Head lowered, he scanned left and right for movement that seemed
out of place, for any wrongness... He found none. From the middle of the
street he cut on a diagonal, closing the distance to de Prey. The cross street
was called
Molybdenum Way. He lowered the briefcase from under his arm to his left hand,
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and its own weight opened it. He seemed to feel the touch of wind on his face.
Threadware calculated trajectories, distances. Ricot was so big that
Molybdenum Way was, for all intents and purposes, flat, the curve
imperceptible. De Prey was probably wearing armor, and that meant a head shot.
Steward, with the support of the threads in his nerves, was confident of
hitting anything he needed at sixty meters provided the target image was
sufficiently uncomplicated.
People bustled around Steward, intent on their own business. He could feel the
whirlwind building in him. There was certainty in
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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind his mind. This would be good
Zen.
He reached into the case, took out the gun, raised it to aiming height almost
casually, and fired a single shot from behind at a distance of thirty-odd
meters. The self-consuming casing made a mild nonthreatening hiss along its
course, like a whisper of wind. The gun s mechanism made a gentle click as it
jacked the next bullet into the chamber. When de Prey s head burst open in a
spray of red, Steward was already poised to return the gun to its case, turn
on his heel, move in the other direction.
The gun thunked into the case. He was already turning, moving after Curzon.
The individuals in the thinning crowd continued on their courses.
Pure Zen, he thought. The movement had been so natural that even in the midst
of the crowd it hadn t seemed out of place. The gun had made no sound that
would awaken people from their postshift dreams. It would take a few seconds
for the afterimage of the movement to register, and then for the crowd to
react... By that time, Steward intended to be on his way. Be another person,
another silhouette, another bullet.
 Hey. Anger hummed in Steward s nerves at the disruption.
This was too soon. Someone must have been looking right at him.
 Hey. Hey, you. A young voice, still filled with surprise.
Behind him there was a growing disturbance.
 Hey, I saw that
! Insistently, but with a touch of wonder in the
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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind words. As if he were asking
Steward to confirm what he had just seen.
Steward still felt the rightness in his soul. He spun in his tracks and raised
a finger to his lips. He saw a young dark-skinned man with a scatter of jewels
implanted as a starburst on his forehead.

Hush!
 Steward told him, saw the confusion in the man s eyes as he turned back into [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]