Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

“I chose my audience.”

“I suppose you’re right; he was just a man, after all, doesn’t know the least bit about anything important. You should know full well, maybe better than anyone, how difficult it is to get cooperation on anything, especially without immediate payback. Much less toward the idea of any kind of centralized authority. A de facto hierarchy is one thing, but regulation is quite another.” She shook her head. “How the Abdicationists think anyone would ever agree to a proposal like this is absurd. And they call themselves moderates -hah! You’re not really an Abdicationist, are you?”

“What,” I said, “and have you think I’m absurd? You know better than to draw an inference about my true thoughts from some remark that happens to drip from my mouth, surely. Expediency, prosecution of a plot, and truth are quite different, it should go without saying; altogether different. Are you quite finished with that chicken?”

A pile of gnawed bones sat in the pool of grease in the midst of the wrapping paper in which the chicken had been served; very little meat, if any, remained, but for all I knew she liked to devour her food down to the skeleton. Jill stood up and moved away from the remains, folding her arms over her chest. “Very well, yes,” she said. “Is it now time to visit Groot, O Great Detective?”

Oolsmouth so far had been a remarkably clean city; part of their civic ostentation, no doubt, was to employ a refuse disposal squad. They had even provided a designated trash container too tall for the roving dogs over on one side of the courtyard. As much to annoy Jill as to assuage my own sense of order, and to eliminate the attack on my aesthetic sense mounted by a heap of ragged bones on an otherwise undisturbed marble bench, I carefully took up the garbage by the corners of its wrapping paper and brought it to the trash area, which was only a few strides away. Jill followed me, unbelievingly. “Your mind has rotted,” said Jill. “There is clearly no doubt about it.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then go away.”

Her sigh was more of a “humph.” “Groot?” she said.

“No,” I said. “Julio was enough for now, and he’ll be busy enough himself with Groot for the time being. Let’s check in with Zhardann.”

“First Groot, then no Groot - why don’t you make up your mind?”

“The one that’s rotten?” I said.

She snarled at me and headed for the horse park. If I was trying to annoy her, it appeared I was succeeding. Actually, I was trying to annoy her, at least a little. I didn’t want her to start feeling happy I was around, or worse yet, comfortable. As long as she thought we were married, I didn’t want her to get the idea that maybe whatever was wrong between us was on the way to being reconciled.

We redeemed the horses and she took the lead; Zhardann had told her where he was setting up shop but hadn’t bothered to clue me in. I waited until Jill’s concentration was firmly on the twisting of streets and intersections before I asked her. “What do you want to tell me about the Oracular Treasury Trust?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know a thing.” The expression that flipped across her face, though, told me something else.

What was she hiding? Probably something having to do with the Oracular Trust’s patron. Was I supposed to know the identity of that god? No, I didn’t think so; she knew something that she didn’t expect me to know. But if I heard the name of the patron, I bet she thought I’d recognize him or her, or more to the point that the god Jill thought I was would know who this other god was. The way things were going, though, I’d find it out eventually. Either she hadn’t thought that part through or she saw some value in keeping the information from me as long as she could.

Zhardann had found lodgings in a predominantly residential section of the city not far from the central plaza we’d just visited, or for all I knew he may have actually owned the place. The three-story house sat solidly on the comer lot of the Lane of Wealth, a street lined with similar houses, each with a neat gentrified garden out front that was fenced off from the cobblestone sidewalks by a chest-high stone wall topped with an iron grating. The gratings all had clever designs worked into them, coats of arms and heraldic beasts and long trailing vines and whatnot, but their vertical bars ended with sharp polished spear-heads: if I knew Zhardann, that detail alone would have been enough to close the lease for him. One of the servants who’d accompanied us down from Roosing Oolvaya unbolted the side gate and Jill and I rode down the carriageway toward the stables at the rear of the house. “See to the horses and freshen up, why don’t you, and then we’ll meet in the house,” Jill told me, swinging to the ground under an awning that stretched from the back door.

“The last thing any horse in his right mind would want is me seeing to him,” I said, easing myself out of my saddle as well. The servant had relocked the gate behind us, and he now took both sets of reins to lead the horses away. Jill gave him a dirty look.

“Just freshen up, then,” said Jill, “or do you have some moral objection to cleanliness as well?”

“I wouldn’t say that, not in the least.” A line of round stepping-stones led from the dirt driveway across the lawn and through the flower beds around the side of the house; a gardener was working his way along it, clipping at shrubs with a pair of shears. A trail of cut leaves snaked behind him all the way to our own position. I stretched out an arm to indicate the gardener. “The mere sight of cleanliness in action, of order arising from chaos through the artistry of skill and hard work, brings a smile to my lips and fills my heart with gladness. But, as you well know, I take nothing to extremes, and I must say I’m feeling remarkably energized, not to say downright chipper, at the moment. If you feel no need to ‘freshen’ yourself, as you put it, I can’t see how I can do less than follow your example. Shall we check in with Zhardann?”

“Ooch, you’re impossible,” she said. She did, however, appear to give up the idea of trying to decoy me away while she talked with Zhardann first without me being around. We scraped off our boots and entered through a sunroom that led into the kitchen, where I could see the cook stowing vegetables in a cupboard. The cook raised her head when she heard us stomp in, jerked her head toward the front of the house, and said, “Upstairs, in the study.” Jill had already headed straight in that direction, into a hall lined with portraits of somebody’s ancestors that led past the entrances to a pair of rooms on each side and then to the entry hall and front door. One side of the hall was taken up by a straight staircase with an ornate banister carved from some dark wood; by the shine of it one of the servants had spent the morning moving up it with a barrel of wax. Up the stairs we went, past another row of portraits and a detailed mythical battle scene, full of dragons chewing on sky-carriages and dodging lightning that rained down from the heavens onto the muddy conflict below and clichéd boilerplate of that sort. The staircase continued to the top floor, but we departed at the end of the first flight, walking about the well in the floor to reach the room at the front corner on the right. Jill eased the door open, peered around the jamb, and then quietly entered.

Windows filled out the two outside walls, overlooking the middle branches of a tree on the right side and the front lawn, spiked fence, and street on the other. The ceiling was paneled with squares of the same dark wood as the staircase. The ceiling panels were separated by rails and hanging bosses, but since the second story was high there was still enough headroom to move freely beneath them. Zhardann sat in a comfortably overstuffed armchair in front of an unlit fireplace topped off with a marble mantle supporting a loudly ticking clock and an array of stuffed birds. The picture over the hearth showed a whiskered man dressed in forest greens brandishing a bow against a backdrop of trees; he was surrounded on a patch of meadow by heaps of bloody birds, an arrow protruding from each, and two more were still falling limply from the sky, one directly above his head. I didn’t recognize the man in the picture, and for that matter I didn’t exactly recognize Zhardann either. The top part of his body, from above his head to his waist, was shrouded by, well, a cocoon , or at least the kind of cocoon that might have resulted if a battalion of silkworms had been using wisps of cloud-cotton instead of silk for the job. The windings of cloud actually continued down his legs to the floor, now that I took a good look, but the lower stretches were wispier, letting the outlines of his legs show through.