Again, not a moment too soon. Something—some things, to be precise—spattered off the other side of the boulder. The impacts were hard enough to be bullets, but the sound they made weren't quite right. Shrapnel of some kind cascaded over the top and down my side of the boulder, and some went down my collar. Cold, wet ... ice chips. The fragger was firing high-velocity icicles at me, or some damn thing. Then and there I decided that yes, maybe I was a magophobe after all.