Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

“You think we’ll see him again?” asked Jurtan.

“Yeah, we’ll see him again, probably right in the middle of some mess like the last time. “

“Unless he’s dead, of course,” Jurtan added, trying to adopt the same natural tone of full-blooded yet abstract appreciation for the world’s twists and turns that Shaa and Max seemed to spin naturally around themselves merely by breathing.

“Dead?” said Max. “What’s that supposed to have to do with anything?” He cast a glance down at Shaa. “I thought you were supposed to be tutoring this kid.”

Shaa shrugged. “Every day, or perhaps every other, something of significance appears to sink in. The younger generation is not what it used to be, if indeed it ever was. I wish you better luck.”

“You sure you don’t want him?” Max said hopefully.

It didn’t bother Jurtan, not any more; at least that’s what he kept trying to tell himself. “Do you mean death in general isn’t something he has to worry about, or that the Sword’s curse means he can’t die?”

“Tricky thing is curse,” muttered the voice of Haddo from within the cabin. “Relevant death may be, or may not.”

“What Haddo says is quite correct,” said Max, raising his voice so that he could be heard in turn by the cabin’s occupants, “but I was thinking more about the gods.”

“Always think you about gods,” said Haddo. “Ulcer get will you.” A small trapdoor in the roof intended for cabin ventilation suddenly popped open next to Max; a black hood and a glowing-coal eye appeared through it. “Envious perhaps are you, of gods their power, of gods their knowledge?”

“You know me better than that, Haddo,” Max said. “I don’t envy the gods, I hate them. I’d love to wipe them out, or at least bounce them back down to mortal status.”

“Join them you would not?”

Shaa and Max exchanged unreadable looks. “I’d die before I’d join the gods,” Max said.

“I thought you said death wasn’t necessarily relevant when you’re talking about the gods,” said Mont. All three heads swiveled to fix him with nasty stares. Max and Shaa, anyway; who knew what an expression passed for on Haddo’s face, if he had a face, but that red thing-that-might-be-an-eye of his did look a bit more exasperated than usual. Mont didn’t get it. Why were they always dumping on him? Oh, all right, he was being a little snotty, but it was an honest question and a relevant one, wasn’t it?

“Truth is truth, except when is not,” Haddo remarked inscrutably, and then he popped back down out of sight.

Shaa opened his mouth, perhaps to continue the exchange. Just at that moment, though, a quick shudder ran through the deck, followed by a side-to-side rocking sensation. Max slid off the roof of the cabin and landed neatly on one of the stacked crates. Instead of what might originally have been on his mind, Shaa said, “Some large river creature?”

“In the middle of Roosing Oolvaya harbor?” said Max. “Fat chance. Where’s Roni?” He and Shaa locked eyes again for a brief instant, and then both of them simultaneously turned to look aft, toward Roni’s temporary lab in the rear of the cabin whose roof Max had been occupying. The ship keeled over again, hard enough to make Mont take several quick off-balance steps toward the port gunwale before he tripped over a knee-high length of stacked lumber. The motion was violent enough to make even Max reach out a hand for support. The ship hesitated, its deck remaining at the extreme of its upward-canted attitude, and in the abrupt silence they heard Roni’s voice say, softly but clearly, “Damn.”

The brief quiet ended with the screaming hiss of what sounded like a cauldron-sized tea kettle heated suddenly to its boiling point. Then, with a crash of tearing lumber, the aft section of the cabin roof blew out, sending fragments of wood arcing through the air. In the center of the cloud of debris was a fist-sized ball of pulsing light wrapped in a lumpy, translucent, and fairly well shredded membrane, the whole structure wriggling in an organic manner. Almost as quickly as the eye could fix on this jellyfish blob, though, a sparkling meshwork column shot up after it out of the hole, the leading end expanded and split radially like the petals of a long-stemmed orchid, and then with an audible clunk the now scoop-shaped petals clamped shut on the flying blob. One final pulse of light leaked out through the mesh as the petals wove firmly together. Now like a small basket at the end of a short, narrow tornado, or perhaps even more accurately at the end of a thick fishing line, the encased blob danced in midair for a short moment; then, making a quick slurping sound, line and basket were sucked back down through the crater and into the cabin.

The ship flopped back to its normal attitude, sending a sheet of spray flying off the starboard side of the hull and across the adjacent dock. Small fragments of singed wood clattered on the deck. Shaa glanced at Max and raised an eyebrow.

“Looked like a supercharged paramecium,” observed Max. “Roni thought she’d try to control the expression of the cellular magic bodies using some of these one-celled microbes she’s been studying. The process is still at a pretty coarse level, obviously. The mid-level containment spells clearly stopped it from getting out of hand without any trouble, though.”

“Except to the ship,” Shaa murmured.

“It’s a small hole,” Max said, clambering back up on the roof and standing over the crater with his hands appraisingly on his hips. “I might as well add some more safeguards, though,” he called down through the hole.

“Sounds good to me,” said Roni’s voice, somewhat weakly, from below.

“What would have happened if that thing had gotten away?” Mont asked Shaa in a low voice.

“I’m not certain we’d want to find out,” Shaa said thoughtfully. “I suppose the consequences might have something to do with whether the organic portion of the construct could freely reproduce.”

Mont’s sister emerged from the cabin, coughing.

Streaks of black soot covered her face. Shaa produced a clean cloth and offered it to Tildamire. “The life of a laboratory assistant does have its drawbacks,” he commented.

“Wow,” she said dazedly. “Real science.”

“Uh, Shaa?” said Mont.

“Not right at the moment, please,” said Shaa. “Hold your thought. Great One,” he continued, raising his voice to carry through into the cabin, “is the situation under control?”

“No problem,” said Karlini, from somewhere in the thinning cloud of smoke still rolling through the door and the hole in the roof. “No injuries, just a lot of soot and some broken glassware and a busted beam or two.”

“Capital,” stated Shaa. “In that case, Maximillian, would you favor us with your presence on deck for a moment?”

“What?” said Max. “Oh, sure.” With a somewhat distracted air, he stepped away from the hole and toward the edge of the cabin roof, dropped forward into a roll just ahead of the verge, grasped the end of the eave beam with both hands when he reached a completely upside-down attitude in his somersault, and straightened his legs above his head to go into a full handstand. After balancing momentarily, he pushed strongly off the beam with his hands and sprang upward in the air. He whipped his legs down, bending at the waist, and then straightened his upper body, effectively flipping himself end over end as he reached the top of his vertical travel and setting his body upright. His feet cleared the edge of the roof by a good six inches on his way back down. Max hit the deck with a thud and bent his knees in a deep crouch to deal with his momentum, his arms out wide to either side for balance and, Shaa was sure, for an extra theatrical flourish.