Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

“This is not what I expected,” said Gash, also to the woman. “I expected you and the ring, and possibly his head or his severed hand or some other appropriate token of his demise. I did not expect the two of you, together, with all his pieces apparently still knitted into a functioning whole. I take it that you didn’t get the ring, either?”

“He doesn’t have it,” she said, entering the tent but remaining on her feet.

“How did he convince you of that?”

“He told a plausible story, and –”

“I’m sure he did.” stated Gash, “I’m sure he did. I understand that’s his specialty.”

“Don’t take that tone with me, Zhardann,” she said, glaring down at him with her hands on her hips. “I’m not a fool, I know quite well what he’s capable of; and furthermore, I wouldn’t have bothered to listen to him if the detector hadn’t failed to pick up the ring on his person, too. Taunt him, yes, but listen to him, no.”

“A detector,” he said. “I see, a detector. How sensitive is this detector, by the way?”

“Sensitive enough.”

“I see. A detector. Full of surprises today, aren’t you, my dear?” Gash puffed thoughtfully on the hookah. Tight little clouds rose out of the funnel and drifted past the woman’s face.

If I’d had a hookah handy, I’d have puffed thoughtfully on it, too. She’d called Gash “Zhardann,” but that wasn’t the first thing that had made me question whether or not he actually was the Gashanatantra I knew. For one thing, he wasn’t acknowledging any prior meetings with me, and I hadn’t read the slightest flicker of recognition on his face. He also hadn’t appeared to recognize the sword Monoch in its disguise as a walking stick, yet he (Gash?) had given me the thing; and for that matter Monoch hadn’t seemed to recognize him either. However, I had no doubt that Gash could be quite thoroughly devious enough to carry out just such an act, based on my earlier experiences with him. For another thing, then, I hadn’t felt a tremor from the metabolic link Gash had left me, the one that plugged my life force into his own. I wasn’t sure I would feel anything from the link if I came face-to-face with Gash again, but nevertheless I thought it was an observation worth making.

That wasn’t all. The woman didn’t recognize him as Gash; she apparently thought I was Gash. Her husband, Gash. If Zhardann was Gash, he was running a more convoluted game than I wanted to think about. That would raise a cart-load of questions. Actually, there was a good barrel-load of questions already on the table in any case.

The most interesting question at the moment was still the identity of this guy Zhardann. Was he the same person (or god) I’d dealt with before, and was that god (or person) actually Gashanatantra? In any case, Zhardann didn’t seem to be talking. That didn’t mean that he might not pull me aside sometime in the future in order to drop a few words of clarification in my ear, but I figured there was no reason to spend good energy waiting up for it. Was Zhardann not talking because he was the same one I ‘d met before but was currently up to some plot, or because he wasn’t the same person and had never seen me before? If he wasn’t the same person, then were the two of them related, was one a clone of the other, or was one of them wearing the other’s shape for some reason?

While I was asking for small favors of elucidation, I was also hoping he’d go ahead and address the woman by name, so I could at least find out what I should be calling her. It might look odd if I was put in a situation where I had to introduce her to someone else and I didn’t know what her name was, considering that she thought I was her husband.

“If he doesn’t have the ring with him,” Gash (or Zhardann) said after a moment, “and he claims not to be in a position to lay hands on it, just where does he say it is, and how does he say he lost -”

“I’m more than willing to sit here,” I interrupted, “lounging on your pillows, but rather than hear all of this at second hand you just might want to hear it straight from me, since I do happen to be here, and all. Especially since we’re going to be partners.”

His eyebrows went up. He looked back at the woman. “How much more of importance haven’t you gotten around to telling me yet?”

Glaring at both of us simultaneously, which was a neat trick since Zhardann (or Gash) and I weren’t in the same line of sight, the woman stalked over to him, sat down next to him on a purple pillow with long gold tassels, and started talking to him in a low voice while keeping her back to me. I figured they’d get back to me soon enough, and I was happy not to have to actually hold up my end of a conversation right at the moment. I wasn’t sure what had made me speak up when I did. There was some sense to it; if I was going to have them treat me as a partner I’d have to keep being assertive and obnoxiously forceful enough for them to continue to believe I really was one of them. On the other hand, I’d made the resolution to keep my mouth shut and key off what they said as much as I could until the ground rules became a little clearer. On the other hand, if I had some buried instinct that thought it knew what was going on better than the conscious me did, and it wanted to jump in and help, I could probably do worse than go along with it. On yet another hand, which clearly made me into some species of octopod, if I started listening to instincts of that sort, I’d have to trust them more than they’d given me reason to in the past. In the past, there were times when I’d followed my instincts to the letter, and that had turned out to be just about the worst thing I could have done.

The woman and Zhardann both looked up at me simultaneously, then bent their heads back together. What could they do to me, anyway? Probably plenty. My close encounter with the woman’s wormball was without a doubt only an introductory lesson in what they had up their sleeves; they could proceed to torture and dismember me, I supposed, winding up with a nice slow eradication, and that would be all. Except if it wasn’t - Max had implied on a couple of occasions that he thought that gods had their ways of sidetracking death. Or Death, to get personal about it. I decided to keep up the fight as long as I could. Something was bound to bounce my way eventually, and hopefully it wouldn’t be the first round boulder in a large avalanche.

Zhardann looked up at me again, but this time he spoke. “Why would you give up, you , of all people, and after you had the ring in your hands , too?”

“There’s giving up,” I remarked, “and then there’s giving up. I thought it might be interesting to stand back and watch somebody else run the fireworks for a change. Items like that ring do have a tendency to come back around, anyway, and they stir up a lot of other interesting stuff while they’re doing it. After all, here you are.”

They exchanged glances; apparently I’d scored a point. “I see,” Zhardann said. “Then where do you think Pasook might be currently?”

“Heck, I don’t know,” I said. “As far as he’s concerned, I’ve given the whole thing up, so he might not even be bothering to take precautions. We could just start with the usual places. I’ll leave it up to you; after all, I was just coming along for the ride.”

“I don’t trust him,” Zhardann told the woman. “It was a bad decision to bring him here.”

“Who said I trusted him?” she said, being a bit huffy about it. “I brought him because he might be use -”

“For what it’s worth,” I put in, “I don’t trust you either. Now why don’t we set all that to the side and go ahead with what we’re going to do?”