Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

Around the middle of the afternoon, they negotiated another hairpin turn in the channel, got hung up for a moment in the roots of one of the tentacular mangroves, as Max had taken to calling them, and then emerged into an area of relatively open water. The swamp grasses were the thickest here that they’d yet encountered, the height of their stalks rising toward the center of the lagoon until they were at least as tall as the tops of the mangroves. Max poled the raft toward the spot where the grass seemed most luxuriant. The grass bent reluctantly before them, occasionally lashing back with a small slap. Their sight of the landscape, such as it was, quickly faded and was lost behind the ascending wall of weeds. Several vessel lengths farther along, though, the bottom of the barge grated along a concealed obstacle and then ground to a complete halt, the bow canted slightly upward.

The grasses had not after all mutated to ascend to gigantic heights but were planted on a low island, its surface barely out of the water. “This looks like the place.” Max said.

“There’s no castle here,” said Mont. “There’s not even a hut.”

‘‘I’ll grant you it is a little surprising not to find anything ,” Max mused. “Maybe there is something here that we’re not seeing. It could have decayed, I suppose, or gotten blown away. Or maybe there was something here, but it’s moved.” He looked suddenly thoughtful.

“You mean, like Karlini’s castle? Or do you think this is where Karlini’s castle actually came from?”

Max continued looking around and peering over the top of the grass line, now brought closer to his own tiptoe height since he was standing on the island. “No, I don’t, actually, but it’s an interesting possibility.”

A more practical consideration abruptly suggested itself to Jurtan. “It’s going to be getting dark pretty soon. Are we gonna spend the night here?”

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

“I knew you were going to say something like that.” Jurtan said with resignation. “Should we let the horses out?”

They let the horses out. As the horses tried snacking on the marsh grass, dubious expressions prominently displayed, Max and Jurtan spread out to examine the small island, Jurtan heading for its center. He was heartily sick of stepping into muck and goo and so was keeping his eyes primarily on his feet and the ground around them. Still, there were enough of the tall plants around interfering with his view that at first he didn’t realize what he had walked onto when he felt something crunch beneath his foot. He bent down to inspect the ground. A small beaked skull extended just beyond the toe of his boot, and the bones of a foot-long wing were outspread on either side of his heel. “Max,” he said.

On his way back over toward Mont’s position from the far side of the island, Max turned up half-a-dozen birds of his own in various states of disrepair. Jurtan had found a few more himself. “Why only birds?” he said. “If there’s something around here that’s poisonous or something, why does it only affect birds?”

“Maybe something drives ground-huggers away that birds are too dumb to notice.” Max said. “What about you? Is that music of yours giving you any hints?”

Jurtan’s ears had been treating him to an increasingly expectant blare of horns underlined by a rapid-paced marching beat from a kettle drum. “It thinks this place is –” what was that phrase Shaa liked to use? “- a location of interest, all right.”

The sun took that moment to ease below the horizon and the sudden gloom leapt out at them. “What’s that other squeaking sound?” Jurtan asked. “Real high-pitched and faint?”

“I can’t hear it myself,” said Max, “because at my advancing age my hearing doesn’t go that high any more, but I’d suspect it’s bats. You catch that other noise, like a few sheets of dry old paper flapping? Bat wings. I’m surprised you can hear them squeaking over the gurgling of this swamp.”

The sky overhead was still reasonably bright. Max looked up into it with suddenly narrowed eyes, at the increasing clouds of bats swooping and twirling after the mosquitoes. About time something showed up to take care of the bugs, too. He thought again about the birds. Some of those dead birds had broken skulls, as though they’d flown headfirst into something they couldn’t see. But bats ...

“Why are they doing that?” Mont said. “The bats. I can see them kind of flopping by overhead there, but there’s sort of a round place where they don’t seem to go, right over the middle of the island.”

The sky and the first few stars shone clearly through the area the bats were avoiding, but avoiding it they were. “The birds can’t see it, but the bats can,” Max said, gazing up with a grin. “That’s our spot, up there.” That was whatever they had come for, suspended in the air and concealed inside a refraction zone.

“Nothing new, eh?”

The Great Karlini looked up from the reference book perched open on his lap. Above the book and a comfortable distance in front of his face, in his favorite individual work-space, sat a three-dimensional matrix of colored crystalline beads, all in shades of green and blue. “Not a thing,” said Karlini. “Did you bring that sandwich you mentioned?”

“I did indeed,” Shaa replied, producing the snack from behind his back and uncovering it on its plate with a flourish of napkin. “I brought more tea, too,” he added, moving the plate to reveal the small pitcher on which it had been balanced as well.

Karlini, still eyeing his work, picked up a neatly sliced sandwich half and took a bite. Then he pulled the sandwich away from his face and stared at it warily. “What is in this thing?”

“The main framework, I believe, is one of those onion-wheat rolls we took on in Roosing Oolvaya,” Shaa said, poking at the remaining half with his finger. “The two principal internal constituent components are the river anchovies, fresh, and the chopped tomato-and-lettuce mixture, although I did take the liberty of adding some of that mashed egg-white batter stuff you like. Also, a lengthwise-sliced pickle.”

“Mayonnaise,” Karlini said, taking another tentative bite. “That what Max said it’s called. He found the recipe in some old scrap he was translating; turned out to be a cookbook or some kind of wrapper for a food container, I think, instead of an instruction manual. You’re sure there’s nothing fishy beside the anchovies?”

“Reasonably certain,” said Shaa. He went so far as to ease the top of the roll back to reinspect the contents. “Why, don’t you like it?”

“What’s not to like? I just wanted to make sure nothing got transubstantiated on your way down from the kitchen.”

“It does pay to be prudent,” Shaa agreed. “Were you expecting something of the sort? In my experience, fish have much less of a tendency to mutate once they’ve landed on a plate.”

“We’ve already had one water-related manifestation,” Karlini remarked in the midst of a munch. “I thought it would be a good idea to keep a weather eye peeled for any more, don’t you think?”

“I take it, then, that you’re speaking from intuition and not because you’ve actually come up with something?”

Karlini took a swig of iced tea. “Is it my imagination or has your mood perked up?”

“I’m always happiest when some force I don’t know is trying to demolish me.”

“We still don’t know for sure that anything’s really happening,” Karlini said cautiously.

“An omen, then,” said Shaa. “An ambiguous omen, if you’d rather. A sign is still a sign; whichever way you slice it, it isn’t every day the lower stretch of the River Oolvaan decides to throw icebergs at you. You haven’t detected a hand behind it, then? Or The Hand, I suppose, for that matter?”