Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

“What if the door’s on the bottom’?”

Max slithered his way up the slope, ignoring Mont. He’d been in a lot of odd situations, but for sheer disorientation value this one was no slouch. Even with his nose up against the surface it was thoroughly transparent - he was looking down at the ground through an unsupported drop in apparent ignorance of the law of gravity. But then he’d reached the top and was outright sitting on air, although it felt more like polished ice than air, he noted. Supported by the loop around his body, he locked his legs around the lower rope and let loose with his hands.

This promised to be one of the trickier parts of the whole enterprise. Before leaving the ground, he had cut a short length of free cable. He fished it out of his shirt now, passed it around the other rope where it crossed itself in its ring around the central support pillar, and made several knots using both hands, which was the only way to do it unless you were going to pull some old fakir trick. Then he flipped another, longer length of rope around the first one, sat up against the pillar, and knotted the rope around his waist.

“That looks weird,” called Mont.

“Tell me about it.” A glance down told Max that, regardless of his kibitzing, Mont had gotten ready with the net. Max hauled in the dangling length of rope and the net came up tied to the end.

Although its tails were certainly ratty, a closer inspection had revealed that the camouflage netting was in hardier shape than his initial once-over had implied. On the ground Max had sliced it halfway through from one edge to its center. With this slit eased around the central pylon, the net draped itself over the sides of the sphere and hung free at its lower hem. A moment more of tying loose ends together across the long slice, and Max had an actual visible surface to work on. He cast loose from his roped-in perch and started creeping across the scaffold.

Max was certainly hoping the door wasn’t on the bottom, and not only because he didn’t want to give the kid the satisfaction of having called it. The door could still be reached even in that position but it would take some tricky rappelling that Max was not excited about at all; it was really too early in the morning for that sort of thing, not to mention a bit gratuitous to boot. In any case, bottom entry would have presented the designer with some significant problems for the layout of the interior if he or she didn’t want things rolling out every time the door was opened. The ball wasn’t tiny, but with a diameter of ten or twelve feet it wasn’t exactly built for entertaining either. Then again, the use of an appropriately suspended lower deck and a guard-rail could have … ah!

The hideout didn’t use second quantum level spell-work; Max had learned that much from the absence of the characteristic emission spectrum during his investigations of the previous evening. He hadn’t been able to learn much more with his nose pressed up against it. True, he could now feel the refraction zone matrix. The fact that the optical discontinuity was standing an inch or so out from the actual underlying surface on which his weight was resting was a disconcerting effect in its own right, if not a totally unexpected one. The underside of the netting where it came closest to the surface fuzzed out as it dipped through the discontinuity and tried to vanish, as did Max’s own hands and other body parts. With his face pressed right up against the interface, the clear view of the ground took on the blur of a cloudy crystal or the reflection of a mirror tarnished enough to show its own silver on top of the image behind.

With his restriction to manual means or at the most to passive, receptive spell-work, even Max had had a smidgen of doubt about his ability to figure out a way into the sphere on any sort of near-term basis, not that he would have mentioned it to the kid; he might not have even mentioned it to Shaa. Too, there was the barest chance that the whole thing was a decoy. It wasn’t until his fingers running carefully across the surface felt a slight ripple, a ripple that on further investigation could actually have been a fine crack, that Max started to feel a bit more confident. The crack outlined a circle just the right size for a hatch. Its top edge was perhaps two feet down from the base of the suspension pillar, which would put it in an appropriate position as well. He tugged open enough of the netting to expose the area.

Of course, another slight hurdle remained to be overcome. He was unable to feel any other surface features either inside the circle or in its immediate vicinity. He decided to risk one or two low-energy revelation bursts, but when these had soaked in through the refraction field nothing had changed; no runes had appeared, no instructions had fluoresced, no locking mechanisms had materialized. To be sure, Max again pressed his face up against the surface and squeegeed it around in a search pattern. Through the refraction haze, he could see Jurtan standing beneath him on the ground, his neck uncomfortably contorted. “Why don’t you hit it?” Mont yelled up.

The last two search spells were still circulating. Max closed his eyes and let himself feel the ebb and flow of field lines. It was a door, that was clear, with a compound-configuration recess that was waiting for some kind of key to catalyze its shift to its other state of stability ... no, there were more than just the two states, now that he looked more closely. The closed-and-locked state was easy, that was the one before him now, and “open” was a matter of logical deduction, but then for that matter so were the two - no, three - trap states whose activation hooks seemed precariously close to the sequence that seemed likely to lead to unfastening. Max would have to concentrate, but he had no doubt he could handle it. It would take awhile, though.

He lifted his head off the ball to get himself into a more comfortable position. Something seemed to retard his movement, tugging his chest back toward the surface. A small tented shape was drawing his shirt outward. Something under his shirt?

The amulet?

Max pulled it out. The central gem was glowing blue, and it was warm . When he let go, the amulet swung out on its chain and clinked against the surface like one half of a magnet pair. It began to turn, clockwise, stopped, counter-rotated half a revolution, then -

Max grabbed it back. It resisted him more forcefully this time; he actually had to yank it away. It came free with a sudden jerk. He had had an unpleasant vision of the door suddenly swinging open into the sphere, the amulet stuck to it, the amulet’s strong chain drawing tight around his neck and dragging him abruptly after it with the choke of an unexpected garrote. Max turned the amulet in his fingers, probing at it. It ignored him. It had been ignoring him since he’d first obtained it, during his last visit to the Imperial Thaumaturgical Archives. Not for the first time, the thought that this particular piece had not come to his hands through total accident was in his mind. If so, the thing’s personality was no less than he deserved. It liked to treat him the same way he treated others.

He’d never had a hint that the amulet was useful as a key, though. Given that it could be a key, it was more likely that it had the action of a skeleton key against a particular class of lock than to presume it had specifically been designed to fit this lock. The latter possibility was certainly the more intriguing, reeking as it did of murky plots, nameless intrigues, and hidden stratagems. That sort of thing was improbable even in the midst of an improbable life-style, but the improbable was not the same as the unheard-of. Still, this was scarcely the time to be pondering the mysterious when more evidence might be available close at hand.