Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

Jill sank silently into another armchair next to the fireplace and facing Zhardann’s while I stretched out on a small sofa. I’d initially thought Zhardann might be in a trance. Now I saw that was clearly less than the whole truth, for the shape inside the cocoon was moving, stretching, and apparently gesturing as though he was talking - without making a sound - to someone who wasn’t there. The sight didn’t ruffle Jill, though, so I saw no reason to let it bother me.

I watched Zhardann’s gauze-wrapped antics carefully all the same. I didn’t have to watch all that long, as it turned out. After a few moments, Zhardann sat back and stopped his writhing, and the cloud enveloping his body began to spin as though caught up in a sudden wind. Then, like a magician grabbing a sheet and pulling it upward, making a point from the center, letting the loose ends flutter behind, and causing the sheet to vanish point-first into a hole in the air, the cloud sucked itself off Zhardann, rose above his head, and disappeared in a rolling puff.

The newly revealed Zhardann was seated at ease with his arms folded across his chest, apparently none the worse for the experience and rather pleased with himself into the bargain. “Guess who’s behind this New Dawn business?” he said to Jill.

“The Oracular Treasury Trust,” she told him. Myself, I thought her tone of voice was a bit too firm and a bit too strained, as though she was trying to warn him of something, but he didn’t seem to be paying as much attention to her as usual; maybe he was still under the aftereffects of the spell of the cloud. Frankly, I had taken the cloud to heart, too. Just because I hadn’t seen much sorcerizing over the past few days didn’t mean it wasn’t there, at least in potential. It wouldn’t do to lose track of the fact that where magic was concerned these two were heavyweight masters. Events might have unfolded conventionally enough so far in our relationship, but that didn’t mean they’d stay that way.

“Of course,” said Zhardann, “of course. You’ve been busy, too, haven’t you? I can’t say I expected to find his hand in this, but then it’s not entirely a surprise either, is it. Focasti thinks there may be an additional operator at work, but even she agrees it’s really his play. Well, he may have carved off more than he can handle this time. I’ve been in touch with some of the others who have an interest in these things, and they’re responsive - the setup even looks strong enough to mount an up-and-down challenge. With the right preparation, we may be able to maneuver him into submission without actually having to use a frontal assault. Wouldn’t that be something? Sapriel on the defensive for once?”

I’d been looking at him but watching her as well, so when Zhardann said the name “Sapriel” and Jill gasped, shot him a dose of eye-powered venom, and immediately turned her gaze on me to capture my response, I’d already prepared myself. I’d been ready for something of the sort: the fact that I didn’t know Sapriel from Haddo was completely beside the point. “Sapriel,” I said, letting the syllables ooze from my mouth as though they’d been steeped in the savory juice of malice. “Indeed, Sapriel. I wouldn’t at all mind getting Sapriel in a situation where he was at someone’s mercy, myself.” Jill presumably thought that Sapriel and I had had encounters in the past, and my guess was that we were supposed to be enemies. “This may be more fun than I’d anticipated. What do you bet that this guy Dooglas is his local front man?”

Jill was a trooper, though; she rolled with it. “Ally, front man, dupe, what does it matter?”

Zhardann, who finally seemed to be returning to earth, said, “Dooglas? Who’s Dooglas?”

“I’ll explain in a moment,” Jill told him. “The obvious plan is for you to continue developing what you’ve begun while my husband moves ahead with the mortals, starting with Dooglas.” She turned to me. “Stay away from these banks, and especially from the Trust. If Sapriel sees you - need I say more?”

“No,” I said thoughtfully. “No, you needn’t, at that.”

“If Soaf Pasook turns up, we may be able to use him, too,” she continued, but by then I was being overtaken by my own thoughts. As if it wasn’t already bad enough worrying about the sticky situation I’d be in if I did run across Pasook, now I had to worry about this Sapriel, too. With luck, if I was going to meet either one of them. I would …

The problem with trying to plan this way was that I realized I’d been relying way too heavily on luck: I was clearly overdrawn in that department. My luck couldn’t hold out forever. When it turned, I just hoped -

Aw, hell, I thought. All I could do was keep playing it bounce to bounce.

But who was Sapriel?

The sun had yet to make its appearance, but the sky had lightened enough with its advance-guard radiance for Jurtan and Max to get to work. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” asked Jurtan, craning his neck upward and squinting his eyes at different angles in a vain attempt to catch a solid glimpse of the object hanging invisibly overhead.

“Not enough like this, no.” Max was back at the edge of the low island in the middle of the swamp, holding his thumb up at the end of his outstretched arm and sighting past it in various directions. “That has to be an internal refraction unit up there; nothing else makes sense. There was a case once where a cache of something-or-other was hidden by a refraction setup, only that one was slung by a cable from the underside of an overhanging cliff. Once you’d figured it out and managed to get to the top of the cliff, you could theoretically slide down the cable to the thing and get into it from there.”

“Couldn’t you use the cable to pull it up? Or just cut the cable and catch it from underneath?”

“Sure,” Max said, “if you wanted to set it off. Of course you couldn’t see the cable itself either. There was about a thousand-foot drop down the face of the cliff, too, as I remember, and you had to hack your way to the top through the ice while hanging from pitons.”

“Why would anyone be crazy enough to hide something that way in the first place?”

“So it wouldn’t get found; what do you think? Or do you mean why would they put themselves through all the overhead they’d need to actually put it there?” Max began to stroll clockwise around the island, shoving his way through the tall grass. “A lot of the problems go away if you can fly.”

“People can fly?”

“Not usually,” Max admitted. “You’ve got your levitation spells and so forth, but there you’re talking truly exorbitant energy costs, and you’ve got more ways to do them wrong than you can - well let’s just say there are good reasons they’re not very popular.” He reached the first of the island’s gnarled mangroves, its roots trailing off into the water, bent over for a close look at its bark, carved a small scraping off with his knife, and launched himself up the trunk. He disappeared into the maze of branches. The tree shuddered, twigs and leaves cascaded down, and then Jurtan saw Max’s head pop up out of the top of the canopy. After glancing around, he disappeared again, only to quickly reemerge at the bottom in the midst of another cloud of leaves. He set off for the next tree. “The person who set it up doesn’t have to be the one who does the flying, of course,” he remarked.

“Like that big bird of Karlini’s, right?” Jurtan said. “You think that’s how you’re supposed to reach this one?”

“It’s a possibility. If I’d built it, though, I’d have made sure it could recognize me, say with an amulet or an acknowledgment code or something of that sort, so it would just lower itself to the ground when I showed up. I wouldn’t want to go through some ludicrous gyrations ever time I needed to come or go.”