Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

Another chunk of ice appeared, caught up momentarily in the bow wave. Shaa’s brow furrowed. He left the rail and walked aft, tracing his way amidst the tangle of lashed-down crates and awkwardly-shaped trade goods, casting an eye as he did over the river on the port side. No additional ice fragments were - no, wait, there was one, after all, draped with a clump of river weed. Reaching the stern cabin, Shaa leaned through the door. “Great One?” he said. “A moment of your time.”

“What you got?” Karlini called back.

“Manifestations. Things are afloat.”

Karlini emerged, blinking his eyes, then squinted as he followed the line of Shaa’s pointing finger. “Ice?” Karlini said. “That’s odd.”

“Indeed. Shall we check the ice maker?”

“A resonance effect, you think? Well, maybe. Might as well start there as anywhere, I guess.” The two of them went forward. The few sailors scurrying about on seamanlike tasks paid them no heed; they’d been advised before the ship left Oolsmouth that they’d be safer all around to let Karlini and his crew putter as they chose, and besides they were getting hazard pay for the voyage.

“The most obvious method of observation, “ Shaa said, proceeding down the short flight of ladder steps into the gloomy companionway beneath the forward deck, rather than up the adjoining stairs onto the forward deck itself, “would be to stand at the bow, trying to watch for the appearance of the ice; not how the ice looks, mind you, but where it seems to be coming from.”

“Resonance can be tricky,” Karlini reminded him. “You get a lot of these effects at a distance, where the additive wave crests are strongest. If the ice maker is buggy, it could easily be generating freezing spots in the river fifty feet away, so just trying to see where the ice is coming from might not give us that much new information.”

“Indeed,” said Shaa. “I can’t say I’ve ever entirely trusted the freezer.” On his right was the small galley. First taking a glance through the door to verify that no one was heading outward in his direction bearing a sizzling cauldron or a snack of pickles, Shaa eased himself through the narrow space between a heap of pots and the sacks of flour, secure against mold in their freshness-spelled wrappings.

The ice machine was perched on a cask of salt cod racked against the timbers of the hull, and was lashed for good measure to the wood. A pipe led upward through the ceiling to the water tank on the deck. Just beneath the ceiling, suspended from the joists by hooks, the pipe entered Max’s purification filter. Shaa turned the stop valve on the pipe, let the water in the filter gurgle downward, opened the catch on the filter box, and carefully withdrew the differentiation sieve, a rectangular chunk of sponge mounted in a wooden edge-frame. The faint nebulous glow in the spell-guide tube leading from the filter box down to the ice maker dimmed and went out. Shaa passed the sieve to Karlini, and they both peered at it.

“Now that I take a good look,” Karlini commented, “this filter is pretty low-powered, isn’t it? The biggest resonant effect you’d expect out of something with this small a level of juice would be an icicle on an adjacent wall.”

“Under most circumstances I’d surely agree with you,” said Shaa, poking at the spongy matrix with a finger; the temperature at its surface dropped abruptly to a skin-numbing chill. “Remember who designed it, though.”

“I haven’t forgotten, but you also have to keep in mind that for a change this isn’t one of Max’s mechanomagical hybrids,” Karlini pointed out. “No moving parts anywhere, just diffusion and transfer processes.”

“What do you think he might have woven into the matrix? And does it use standard first-order techniques or more of those new second-quantum-level effects?”

Karlini passed a palm over the sieve’s surface. “Feels first-level to me. Max is trying to keep the second-level stuff under wraps, anyway. I don’t think he’d risk blowing his big new breakthrough over something as mundane as an ice machine.”

“Trust me,” Shaa said. “When Max gets to tinkering on a project he’s liable to end up using any technique he can lay his hands on. He’s also assiduously solicitous about his creature comforts.”

“But we’re the ones with the ice maker, not him,” Karlini reminded him.

“He thought he was doing us a favor.”

“He was doing us a favor. How else do you think we’d be getting civilized refreshments? We don’t have space for an ice locker with all Groot’s stuff on board. I like having ice.”

“So do I,” Shaa admitted. Something thudded against the outside of the hull, sending a shiver through the deck, and then rasped along the side of the ship just at their position and halfway up the wall, a bit below where the waterline was probably located. The grating lasted a few seconds, then stopped abruptly. Shaa looked at the disassembled ice maker, then at Karlini. “You know,” he said, “I think this device is working just fine. What do you say we shift the focus of our investigation? It sounded like that one was larger than the ones I saw before, and it was obviously closer as well.”

Before Shaa could finish, Karlini had already shoved the pieces of the ice maker back together and was heading through the door. Shaa followed him down the companionway and up the stairs to the foredeck. The captain was already there, accompanied by Haddo and Wroclaw, who had apparently been polishing the brass-work, judging by the pile of cloths at his feet, the vile-looking bucket of oily polish, and the half-shiny stanchion at his side. They were all gazing off the bow at the ice chunks. The pieces of ice were definitely more numerous, and they were also without question getting larger - in fact, Shaa noted, it was not nearly as much of an exaggeration now to think of them as small icebergs. Haddo turned as they approached, an accusatory expression apparent in the inclination of his hood. “Not liking am,” Haddo said, “this.”

“Captain Luff,” Shaa said, “I take it this is not a typical phenomenon for this section of the river?”

“Never seen anything like it,” admitted the captain. “Kind of nice to look at, though, wouldn’t you say? Except for the fact we’re on a ship, don’t you know, and the blamed things look like they’re aiming for us.”

“Do you intend to engage in evasive action?”

“I’ve been considering just that very point, Mr. Shaa,” the captain said, stroking his short silvery beard. “Perhaps your own opinion, or Mr. Karlini’s, there, would be helpful to the situation. I’ve sailed the seas and rivers, as boy and man, don’t you know, and the only times I’ve seen the like of this business there’s always been some deviltry afoot. You two gentlemen, you’ll excuse me for mentioning, seem to be the ranking authorities on deviltry in these parts.”

“We thought it might be the ice maker,” Karlini said, “but it wasn’t, or at least we don’t think it was. We don’t know what it is, but I suspect it’s not just going to go away, and by the look of things those ice things are getting bigger, I think we can all admit that. I agree with Shaa; I’d recommend getting ready to evade them. They’re solid, sure enough, not some illusion.”

“Frankly, Captain,” Shaa added, “I’d advise sailing your ship as you choose and not bothering to ask us for advice on it, or anyway not in the middle of a piloting emergency.”

“As indeed I have been doing,” said the captain. What remained unspoken but understood was the captain’s desire to avoid stepping on any toes that might lash out and bite him, Shaa thought, wincing a little as he mangled his own metaphor out of all semblance to civilized discourse. Captain Luff seemed to have reason to know that practicing magicians tend to be a dangerously prickly and unstable lot, although what he thought of Karlini in particular, and even Shaa, with their more than typically free-wheeling attitude toward matters of serious import, remained untested. “Just you gentlemen pipe on up when you have something to contribute,” the captain continued.