Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

“Now, would I do something like that?” Max said distractedly.

“Well, okay, but what about magic, then? Is that what I’m really supposed to ask? I know you said it’s usually more efficient to rely on physical means, but if it’s not that large a swamp anyway -”

A large bubble burst on the surface of the water to Jurtan’s left, releasing the rank smell of spoiled eggs. Jurtan’s horse knocked him in the back with its head. Jurtan wished he knew how to tell the horse how much he agreed with its assessment. Max had paused just ahead and was looking around with an appraising manner. He sniffed the air. Jurtan had seen him do this before, usually when there wasn’t anything worth smelling that he’d been able to detect, and so he had the general idea that what Max was trying to sense was not necessarily a physical aroma.

Max looked around again, then spoke in a low voice. “I’ve got reason to believe magic won’t work right in this area, and even if it did it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to try. If the reports I heard are right, a guy named Iskendarian used to work here.”

“In a swamp?”

“He built the swamp. He was a very clever fellow, very clever indeed.”

“‘Was’? Is he dead?”

“That’s what they say. He hasn’t been around in a half-century or more, at least not so anyone’s been able to find him, and he’d probably be a hundred-fifty or two hundred years old by now anyway. Still, most likely it’s not a relevant question. For a sorcerer like Iskendarian, death can be a matter of degree.”

“You can be sort of dead?”

Max turned and again began gingerly picking his way deeper into the swamp. “Let’s just say there’s a continuum between sleep and total loss-of-consciousness death. Even if he is absolutely dead, I may still be able to get some information out of him. If he’s even here.”

“This sure isn’t a place I’d want to be dead in,” Mont muttered, pulling one foot free of a particularly clinging patch of ooze with a mushy slurp. “What’s this Iskendarian guy have that you want, anyway?”

“Knowledge,” Max said. “Maybe answers. That spell of Namelessness the Sword’s wearing, for one.”

“You’re not thinking this Iskendarian himself cast the spell on the Sword, are you? Could Iskendarian cast spells while he’s dead? Is death that relative?”

Max grimaced. “I don’t know, but I think it might be better if I did, don’t you? The Sword’s Spell has certain hallmarks of Iskendarian’s style. There’s actually another question I’d be even more interested in getting an answer to. If Iskendarian did have anything to do with this spell - a prospect I seriously doubt, mind you, but it’s always worthwhile to keep an open mind - well, the question is why would he bother? When you’re dead, you don’t get out much. How would he have even met the Sword? Nobody’s seen Iskendarian for longer than the Sword’s been alive.”

“You don’t know where the Sword came from,” said Mont. “How do you know how old he really is?”

Max stopped, both legs submerged to mid-hip in the midst of a pair of widening ripples, and looked thoughtfully over his shoulder at Mont, one eyebrow raised. Then he nodded once, slowly, his lips screwed up on one side in absent concentration. “Nevertheless.” Max said, “Iskendarian probably doesn’t have anything to do with it. Someone may have gotten hold of his notes, though, or if he was hard up enough he might have actually taught somebody the technique. Even if the spell’s got nothing to do with Iskendarian, his own formula might suggest a generic mechanism that could be used to undo it. And anyway I was planning to stop off here sometime regardless of the Namelessness thing. Iskendarian planted a reasonable portion of the foundations of modern magic; by all accounts, he is - or was - a remarkably tricky guy, so there may very well be something around worth learning from. And as long we were headed in the right direction ...” He shrugged and turned back to the slow struggle toward the gradually approaching trees.

Jurtan looked at the swamp, his mind picking out rough chords for him on what sounded like a banjo. He had heard from Shaa that ruins and pre-Dislocation rumors drew Max like a dehydrated sponge drew water. Jurtan had held out what he had suspected was the forlorn hope that he wouldn’t have to get too much direct knowledge of Max’s peculiarities through personal experience. Shaa - suddenly Jurtan put together something Max hadn’t exactly come right out and said in words. Max had implied that Iskendarian might be a master of longevity or even rejuvenation; that would have been the most natural way for him to be walking around causing trouble at an age approaching two hundred. And Shaa was certainly in need of some significant rejuvenation of his own.

Behind Jurtan, his horse was muttering again. “Is it a good idea to be taking horses into this stuff?” Jurtan asked. “Mine doesn’t seem to like it.”

“It’s not great,” agreed Max. “Unfortunately, we don’t have much choice. We should end up coming out on the other side, for one thing, and for another if we left them here we’d never see them again.”

“But if they sink out of sight into this stuff, we’ll never see them again either.”

“That’s true enough. What would you do?’’

Jurtan looked back at his horse. It was mucking along, probably moping a bit, but aside from the occasional snort it wasn’t breathing particularly hard. One brown eye caught his with a disgruntled expression. The horse wasn’t quite fed up yet, though. “How about this,” Jurtan suggested. “We make it to the trees. If we can get a good enough raft out of them, we try to take the horses with us. If we can’t, we let them decide. It looks like they’re game if we are.”

Max took another step and disappeared beneath the surface. After a moment he thrashed back into sight, his hair drooping over his head as though he’d acquired a drowned muskrat for a toupee. He spit out a mouthful of water. “Game,” he said. “Right. Some game.”

They sloshed and floundered their way ahead, the trees beckoning them on. Max reached the grove first, having gained even more ground on Jurtan, who had been wasting a lot of his energy swinging at mosquitoes, and climbed out onto a low hillock barely awash with water. “Huh,” said Max.

“What is it? Is there something wrong with the trees?”

“Forget the trees,” Max said. His horse followed him onto the mound and in among the scrubby trunks, and then the two of them began to drop down out of sight. Jurtan thrashed forward more vigorously and finally struggled out onto the ridge himself. The additional height let him see over the front side of the hillock and its marsh grass and down onto a clear-water channel a short distance back, where Max was examining a flat barge-like boat. A mostly decayed net of woven reeds had been thrown back onto the bank. “It looks old,” said Max, “but solid.”

“Whose do you think it is?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the man’s himself; Iskendarian’s. At the moment, though, I’d say it’s ours.”

No one else arrived to question that presumption. After Max had checked the boat for traps and judged it clean, they managed to coax the horses on board by having them step straight off the bank. Although the boat rocked alarmingly and shipped water over its low gunwales, it showed no serious signs of becoming unbalanced. The attitude of the horses was not remarkably improved by the move from muck to boat. Once they were tied down and the boat had stopped lurching from side to side, however, their nervous whickering began to quiet.

The boat was really more of a raft with what amounted to a small fence around its outside edge. With the four of them on board it proved crowded. It had gotten them out of the bottom ooze, though, and when Max and Jurtan set to work with the poles they had found lashed to the deck, they discovered a similar improvement in their speed compared to slurping through the goop. A maze of sluggish channels among the twisted trees led them further into the swamp.