Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

“Oh, very well,” said the Great Karlini. “But do I really look that ridiculous?”

“Of course, dear,” Roni said serenely, “but you wear it so well. How’s our loading coming?”

“The staff’s restless again,” Karlini said. “I don’t blame them. We’ll all feel better when we’re on the move.”

“I suppose. Did you untangle the letter from Groot?”

“Haddo and Wroclaw are redecorating the cabin on top of it. Anyway, the letter’s probably only another warning to be careful with his boat.”

“I don’t know,” Roni said. “There, now you can appear in public. Give me your hand. But about this letter - do you think we can trust the crew?”

“It’s Groot’s boat,” said Karlini. “It’s Groot’s crew, too. You might as well ask if we can trust Groot.”

“Well, can we?”

A seagull flapped down and perched itself on Karlini’s shoulder. He ignored it. “As far as anyone, I guess. Depends on where the profit is. He’s always had a soft spot for Max, though.”

“Haven’t we all,” remarked Roni. “That’s better. Try to wait at least five minutes before disgracing yourself again, will you please, dear?”

“You knew what you were in for when you married me,” Karlini said.

“Right. I told you I wasn’t ready for children and I ended up married to one instead.”

“Would you like me to give you back your receipt?”

“Shut up,” Roni said, “you idiot.”

“Very well, dear.” Karlini said, affecting an aggrieved expression. “How’s the research coming?”

“It’s hard trying to work out of boxes, with the apparatus packed away, but I think the trip won’t be a total loss. I do have enough data put by to just sit and think about stuff for a stretch.”

“You won’t, though, if I know you. You still think all this is leading somewhere?”

“Oh, yes,” said Roni, “no question about that. The biologically cellular roots of magical power, no less. Whether we can understand it well enough to harness it, of course, still remains to be seen.”

“We all have confidence in you,” Karlini said.

“Confidence isn’t the point. We’re dealing with intricate systems, tremendous energies, things we’re not even close to being able to comprehend. Traditional magic is dangerous enough as it is, and that’s when you already know what you’re supposed to be doing, and yet here we are trying to forge new tools out of a whole new field. It’s intimidating as anything. If you ask me, I’ll take pure research over this any day.”

The seagull, which had been nibbling inquisitively at Karlini’s earlobe, hopped into the air, beat its wings once for balance, and landed nimbly atop his head. “Why does this thing keep following me around?” he said, craning his eyes upward in an attempt to gain early warning of the gull’s next move.

“Maybe it thinks there’s something lovable about you. There’s no accounting for tastes, I suppose.”

A leathery, attention-getting “hurrumph” sounded from behind them. Karlini shifted his position to crane his head around without dislodging the seagull. It was Haddo, the bright sunlight doing no more than the gloom in the cabin to reveal a single detail within his hood. “Bird,” announced Haddo, “must fly I.”

“Go ahead, Haddo,” said Karlini, “and thank you. We’ll see you later.”

Haddo scuttled away. “‘Thank you’?” said Roni.

“Don’t ask.” They watched the passing water traffic for a moment. Then Karlini said abruptly, “Don’t let Max stampede you into this, dear. He’ll survive.”

“Yes, but that’s just the point, dear, don’t you see?” Roni said. “ Will he? And will we ?”

I took a last look around my office. I know it’s ridiculous to get sentimental about places, especially rental ones, but the office and I had covered a lot of ground with each other, so to speak. At any rate, I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’d covered the floor of the office with my own body, and for all I knew some of the copious amounts of organic fluids I’d spilled in that place were still dripping through knotholes to the floor below. The room was as bare as I’d found it, which really wasn’t that bare; I’d known that anything personal I brought in was as likely as not to wind up smashed against the wall, if not across my head. The old bashed-in shield still hung over the entrance door. It had come in with the place and would go out with it, too. It was only in the last few weeks of investigation that I’d discovered that the shield had not actually been mine, receiving its dent in some campaign of my youth, but then it had only been a few months or so before, when I’d fallen in with Max and his crew for the first time, that I’d realized I had virtually no memory of my life before I’d arrived in Roosing Oolvaya seven years earlier.

The Curse of Namelessness, as Max had called it, was apparently not something you ran across every day, even if you were a sorcerer specializing in that sort of thing. Max wasn’t that type of specialist, or at least I didn’t think he was; his strongest talent that I’d been able to identify was an absolute genius for driving people crazy with cryptic references and vague allusions he would consistently refuse to amplify. Well, two could play at that game, I’d thought initially, but it was turning out to be harder than I’d figured, since one of the major items of analysis was my own mind. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t nearly at the end of my patience with Max, as exasperating as he could be. Any aggravation I went through with him was pretty mild compared to knowing I might still have a serious enemy out there, somewhere, who had hit me with this spell in the first place and had not only wiped out my past but even any knowledge of my own name.

Magic. Things always come back to magic, don’t they? I hate magic. Of course, more and more my own life was coming to be wound up with the stuff. I knew I was in trouble when I found myself hoping that my memory problems could be traced to merely being hit over the head one too many times, but Shaa, the physician, had assured me that my condition was not, as he put it, “a simple organic amnesia.” Realizing I’d rather have physical brain damage than have to keep dealing with magic didn’t make me feel more secure about my sanity, but -

There was a knock on the closed door.

Oh, no , I thought, not again . The last time there’d been someone at that door who’d managed to approach without triggering a squeak from the staircase I’d adjusted specifically to act as an adjunct doorbell, it had meant trouble, big trouble; the trouble, in fact, that had landed me with Max and his friends in the first place, and had nearly resulted in the destruction of all of Roosing Oolvaya to boot. While I was contemplating escape through the side window and over the roof, the locked door opened and a woman came in.

Unlike the last time, when the visitor had been pale and tweedy and merely radiated an air of deadly purpose, this one had the burnished skin of a person who spent a lot of leisure time sitting on a tropical beach listening to the waves. And watching the sharks at play. The major thing about her that reminded me of Gashanatantra was that aura of “We’ll do it my way or we’ll pull off a few fingers and then try it again,” the kind of attitude that probably passed for conventional light chitchat in her usual circles. I didn’t need the warning tingle in the back of my head to know that whatever the mess before had really been about, it was back in motion again.

I was about to say, “How’s your pal, Gash?” thus getting in the first word, bolstering my fortitude with a typical display of hard-boiled effrontery, and making it appear that I understood everything that was going on, and then some. But even though it seemed the perfect way of opening a conversational match of wits between us, an uncharacteristic burst of caution froze my jaw. Instead, I merely leaned back against the side wall next to the window, crossed my arms over my chest, and eyed her with as unflinching a gaze as I could muster on such short notice. The door swung shut behind her of its own accord, a cute trick I was sorry I’d never practiced myself while business was slow, and she planted her feet firmly on the floor in front of it, spread at shoulder width, letting her arms hang, the palms open and facing toward me and the air curdling slightly within their grasp. Her eyes were the color of lightning.