Na Maka'i had cordoned off the crime scene much the same way we were taught in the Star. Where trees, picnic benches, and the like were conveniently placed, the cops had strung up that universal yellow police line tape between them. To cover open ground, they'd used the collapsible lineposts that every cop car on the planet has somewhere in its trunk. I ambled over, and when I reached the police line, I held up the yellow tape and ducked under it. I took another step toward the two cops crouching on the ground…

And rapped my nose and forehead against an invisible barrier that was as unyielding as a concrete wall. "Frag," I grunted. Instinctively, I tried to step back.

No go. There was an invisible wall behind me now, too. And one to the right and to the left when I checked. It was like I was in an invisible and slightly undersized phone booth. For a couple of seconds I did the old street-mime shtick, palms pressing flat against unseen walls. Then I cringed and covered my ears as a high-pitched siren shrieked from somewhere behind my left shoulder. Frag, why not? Invisible walls-why not an invisible burglar alarm, too?

I watched helplessly as the sumo-gutted cop left the kids and strode menacingly across the grass toward me. "Mai ne'e," he barked. "Don't move, haole." I snorted at that. Like I could. "What you doing here, huh?"

"Coming to talk to you," I told him calmly. And I pointedly pinned my deputy's badge to the collar of my tropical shirt

The cop was good, I had to give him that. His look of absolute and total disgust lasted only a fraction of a second before he slapped an expression of polite eagerness on his face. "Aloha, e ku'u haku," he rumbled to me. Then he snapped something else, apparently to the empty air. I almost keeled over, off balance, as the invisible walls surrounding me were suddenly gone.

"Thank you, Officer…?"

"Constable Saito, sir. What can I do for you?"

"Show me around," I suggested. "What's been happening here?"

The sumo-stomached cop nodded and led me across the grass to where the two forensics boys were still poking around. One of them looked up at me and drew breath to kvetch, but Constable Saito shut him up with a foul glare. "Sacrifices again, sir," Saito said unnecessarily. He pointed at what looked like a makeshift altar, jury-rigged from flat rocks that had recently formed the border of a flower bed. Something had been burned on that altar-something that had left behind a pile of blackened, crumbling bones.

"What was it?" I asked.

"Pua 'a," one of the forensics types answered, then translated, "Pig, sir. Young pig."

"Something more, too." The voice sounded from empty space, a meter to my right. I jumped, then tried to pretend I hadn't. Mages-they're always finding new ways to give me the fragging willies.

"What do you mean?" I queried.

"Something else was killed here," me mage's disembodied voice elaborated. "Not a pig."

"A metahuman?"

"Not sure," the voice said. I glanced over at the kahuna's meat-body, saw it frown. "Shielded."

"What do you mean, 'shielded'?"

This time the voice came from the kahuna's meat-body as he climbed to his feet. "There was a death here," he explained, "I can feel that much. I can't tell what it was that died… and I should be able to."

I nodded as if I actually understood. "Only the pig was burned, though?"

"Only the pua 'a," me shaman confirmed impatiently.

The forensics people had finished collecting their samples of ash and bone and now were scanning the rocks of the altar with a low-intensity UV laser to bring out latent prints. Good luck, boys-the heat of the fire would almost certainly have obliterated anything usable.

I turned my back on the altar and looked at the surrounding ground. Some kind of intricate pattern had been cut into the grass-no, not cut, I realized-burned in. The lines were sharply defined and surprisingly narrow. You couldn't do a job like that by pouring lines of gasoline and igniting them, the way I'd figured at first. You needed something that burned much hotter and faster. Hmmm, I thought-someone had gone to some effort here.

I stepped back for a better overall picture of me pattern. Two concentric circles, centered on the altar, one maybe ten meters in diameter, the other maybe eleven. The half-meter-wide annulus between the two circles was divided into quadrants by radial lines. I checked the sun and guesstimated-yes, the radial lines seemed roughly aligned with the cardinal points of the compass. Around the annulus there were an even dozen strange, angular symbols. Not burned, these, but formed from scores of small, white pebbles carefully aligned. I looked around-no, as I'd suspected, there wasn't an obvious source for those pebbles anywhere in the Puowaina park.

Finished with his ghost-walk, the cop-kahuna was now carefully photographing each of the arcane-looking symbols around the circle. I jandered over to him and waited for him to acknowledge me. His frown told me he didn't want to, but I saw his eyes flick down to my deputy's badge. "Yes, sir?" he asked at last. (The "sir" seemed to cause him physical pain.)

I indicated the concentric circles with my toe. "What is this? A hermetic circle? A medicine lodge of some kind?"

He wanted to roll his eyes, I could tell, but he managed to control the impulse. He shrugged. "Neither," he said. Then, less certainly, "Not really."

"What, then?" Another shrug. "Is it hermetic or shamanic?"

For a moment he looked really uncomfortable. He shrugged once more.

Which was interesting. Neither hermetic nor shamanic… or maybe both hermetic and shamanic, if that made any sense. Hell, at one time or another, everyone's overheard those airy-fairy philosophical discussions about the structure of magic-the hypothesis that magic is magic and that's it. That the distinction between hermetic and shamanic is entirely artificial, one made by (meta)human minds, but not innate to the mana itself. Was that what these symbols represented? Or were they just meaningless-some fraghead mage-wannabe copying something he saw on the trid?

"What would you use something like this for?" I asked me kahuna.

"I wouldn't use it for anything," he snapped.

I sighed. "What would someone else use it for then? What might they use it for?" I corrected quickly, to forestall another case of literal-mindedness.

"Don't know."

I shot the kahuna a penetrating look. He was really uncomfortable now, and it was making him sullen. (Magicians of all stripes hate admitting they don't know everything-I learned that long ago.) "You've got to have some idea," I pressed. "It's got to remind you of something. What might it be?"

For a moment he just glared stink-eye at me. Then I saw his eyes change as he surrendered. "Could be some kind of conjuring circle," he mumbled. "Could be."

"For summoning spirits? You mean the mage or shaman or whatever stands in the circle-"

"No," he cut in with a look that clearly completed the thought-you fragging twinkie. "Conjurer stands outside the circle, thing that gets conjured inside the circle… till kahuna lets it out. Okay?"

"So what would you conjure using something like this? Elementals? Spirits? What?"

Some unreadable expression flickered across his face. "Nothing," he said firmly. "Couldn't conjure nothing with this. Not elementals, not spirits, okay?" And-deputy's badge or not-he turned his back on me and strode away. I watched him climb into one of the Patrol Ones, shut the door, and just sit mere in a sulk.

Interesting. What was it the functionary had told the Ali'i' Up until now, the magical mumbo-jumbo surrounding the sacrifices in Puowaina had been meaningless. This time, though, the kahunas hadn't been sure of that. That represented a pretty significant change in things, didn't it? The cop-kahuna's reaction had certainly fit with that analysis.