Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

“Do you think your amulet ... ?”

“Hasn’t seemed to do much since we’ve been here,” Max said, “has it? Anyway, that’s not one of its functions, at least not as far as I know. Another possibility is there’s a ladder hidden around here someplace. It’d have to be an awfully tall ladder from the looks of it, though.”

Jurtan now had to shade his eyes against the first direct glow of the sun. He walked around so the sun was at his back and stared upward again. “What holds it up?”

“What do you think holds it up?” Max was on his third tree now. This time, though, the trunk resisted the cut of his knife, and even gave off a small thunk when he jabbed it with the point. He pulled down a branch and peered intently at its leaves.

Was this a trick question? “Uh, magic, right?”

“You have any idea how strong a field spell you’d need to keep a couple-ton object hanging in the air indefinitely? Damping instabilities alone would drive you crazy. Let’s just say I sure wouldn’t want to try it.”

“But I thought this Iskendarian guy was even smarter than you.”

“That’s not the way I would have put it, kid.” Max’s voice came from midway up the tree. “You feed a critique like that to most spell casters and all of a sudden you find out you’re facing the rest of your life as a kumquat or some squishy kind of amphibian.”

“I’m sorry,” Jurtan said, “but didn’t you tell me -”

“I don’t think even Iskendarian could have pulled it off. In any case, he didn’t. Those tests I was running last night not only confirmed this isn’t a real healthy place to be doing spell-work, they would have gone off the scale if there was a field of that magnitude around.”

“ Something’s got to be holding it up. A big magnet under the ground?”

Max eased himself carefully out of the leaves at the top of the tree and felt around him in the air. “Ah-hah!” he said after a moment. He leaned over and began to trace a flat surface in pantomime with both hands.

“Okay,” Jurtan said thoughtfully. “Not a magnet. What about -”

Max rapped on the air with the hilt of his knife. The air clunked. “A pylon. It’s grafted into the tree. Probably swings over like an arch. Most likely we’ll find two more of them at equal intervals around the shore.”

“Hey! - that’s pretty neat. You going to climb up it now?”

“Too slippery,” said Max, running his hand along the invisible surface. “Could be a side effect of the refraction field.” He retreated back into the tree.

“With all this swamp gas, you could lift a balloon, couldn’t you? Or a kite! What about a kite?”

“You feel any wind?” Max dropped to the ground from the lowest branch and shook off the leaves. “I’ll admit I was thinking about a kite myself, and I’ve always been fond of balloons, although we don’t have nearly enough fabric between us to build one big enough.” He reached their small camp next to the beached boat and began rummaging through the packs. One of the grazing horses ambled over to gaze dubiously over his shoulder.

“I could run across the island dragging the kite.” Jurtan suggested. “Or we could let one of the horses pull it. The kite doesn’t have to stay up, just hop high enough for the rope to go over the - oh.”

Max had come up with his machine-crossbow and was winding its spring with the foot-pedal. An arrow in place, he clipped the reel of line to the hook at the back of the fletching, walked back toward the tree with the pylon, sighted, and fired. The arrow sprang into the air, nosed over in a neat parabola, and plunged down, dragging behind it the light rope humming out of its reel. As the arrow embedded itself upside down in the soft ground the rope hesitated, still keeping to the line of the parabolic trail, fluttered, and began to fall, then suddenly paused in the middle and grew taut. “Now we’ll see if that column’s got a razor edge,” Max commented, just as the line parted into two segments at the very top. Each one flapped separately to the ground.

“Not surprising,” said Max. “I’d have done the same thing myself. Anyway, it was worth a try.”

“So what now? We try the kite?”

“No, the arrow again, only this time I aim for the center where the pylons meet, now that I know approximately where it is from the curve of the column.” He rolled up the loose end of cord, detached it from the arrow, wiped off the mud, loaded and sighted, and again let fly.

The arrow was still heading upward as it passed the center of the island when they suddenly saw it stop in the air with a small thunk and bounce back. It had barely tumbled five feet before it hit something else, fell flat, and started to slide down a smooth curve, dragging the cable behind it. The cord was outlining the surface of a sphere that curved away to Max’s left. Heading toward the right, he broke into a run, still carefully holding the crossbow, as above him the rope drooping across the invisible suspended sphere paused in its slide. The arrow dove into the ground. The rope, though, was remaining up.

Max completed a circuit around the hanging rope, passing the embedded arrow pathway around his path. The cord hovered in the air, apparently unsupported by anything solid. On one end the arrow held it down like a tent-peg. From the arrow, the cable angled up in a straight line to a point perhaps forty feet overhead, bent over the curved top of a spherical surface, looped once around itself, outlining a circular space two feet in diameter, and then led downward again in the same manner, displaced a third of the way around the sphere from its entrance. It terminated in the crossbow reel Max still held. “Let’s get that net,” Max announced, carefully setting the crossbow down in the grass.

They unloaded the decrepit net they had originally found camouflaging the boat. “You’re actually going up there?” Jurtan asked with a note of incredulity.

“You want to do it instead?” Max adjusted his re-sorted knapsack on his back. “That is the whole point of this exercise, in case you weren’t paying attention along the way.”

“You really enjoy this stuff.”

“Regular storehouse of rhetorical questions, aren’t you,” Max muttered. He hefted a coil of heavier rope over to the upended arrow and tied one end of it around the arrowhead. “Watch that it pays out smoothly,” he told Jurtan.

“What’s the matter with the rope that’s already up there?”

Max began pulling, carefully winding the slender cord back onto the crossbow reel. “See how thin it is? The stuff’s strong, but it’s a pain getting a good climbing grip.” The heavier cable rose into the air, navigated the loop, and sunk back down into Max’s grasp. One of the wizened trees had dug in not far from his position: after disengaging the thin cord from the new thick segment, he pulled the free end over to the tree and tied it securely around the trunk. Then he crossed back to Jurtan. Jurtan was looking across at the knot around the tree.

“What am I supposed to do if you lose your hold and -” The rope jerked at his feet. Where had Max gone this -

Max was already halfway up, his hand-over-hand grip backstopped by the loop of rope slapped around his waist and dropping loosely between his feet. He scurried up another ten feet, then slowed. Just above his head, the cable curved over across the invisible sphere. Max slowly reached out toward it.

“Huh,” he said, again running his hand along a pantomime surface. “Looks like it is a full ball. I thought it might be flat on the bottom.” At least it wasn’t rotating, and it hadn’t zapped him, either. Of course, those had been the safe odds. It hadn’t fried the birds; they’d only bashed into it.