Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

Max slipped the chain off over his head and gingerly inserted the amulet into the guide-path he’d felt earlier weaving its way through the lock matrix. In fact, the amulet had its own clear idea of where it wanted to go. This time, it hit the invisible sphere with the protruding curve of its big gem, a jewel that in its resting state was clearly a diamond but that at the moment had shifted color to become the spitting image of a large sapphire. The jewel wobbled once, then hung in space, twisting back and forth in apparent insubordination to the standards of earthward motion. Then the jewel trailing its chain sank downward into the air and disappeared from sight. Max’s hand, outstretched after it, encountered no resistance of its own, and similarly faded out. He lowered his head into the empty space.

After a short distance, the space wasn’t empty at all, which was scarcely a surprise. The view of netting and ground dimmed and suffused into mist. Instead, there was the hatch, swung down and back, its surface now revealed as metal polished to a light matte finish. His amulet still hung outward from the hatch with its gem just touching the surface. Just beyond the hatch in the middle of the sphere and dangling on a tripodic chain from the roof, a large wizard-light globe was in the process of igniting itself, its color pulsing back and forth between green and purple and finally settling for an atmospheric pale solferino. It lit up a ball-shaped room of the right proportions to match the volume draped by the netting outside, a flat peg-and-groove floor covering the lower bilge curve. Bookcases bent around the wall and outlined a small desk across from the hatch. In the center of the floor was an ornate rug, and on top of the rug was a comfortable-looking divan.

The divan and its head-pillows bore the imprint of a human-sized body. Not, however, the recent imprint - someone had spent enough time there in the past to dent the springs, but they didn’t seem to have been around any too lately, judging from the quantity of dust and the number of drooping cobwebs. Either Iskendarian hadn’t wanted to spend the effort to set up a perpetual cleanliness spell or he just hadn’t cared one way or the other about housekeeping. Or, possibly, he hadn’t planned on coming back. From the number of books on the shelves and the height of the stacked manuscript notebooks and loose pages by the desk, though, that last guess seemed less than apt. Now, how much of the stuff could Max carry? Maybe it would be better to settle in for a few weeks and just read everything.

The manuscripts were the logical place to start. The only problem, Max realized as soon as he started paging down through the sheets from the top, was that Iskendarian had exhibited good paranoid technique by using his own writing code. Max could recognize equations interspersed among the text; it was difficult to disguise their form but much easier to obscure their contents. Here he had a whole transformational derivation stretching through five - ten! – pages. Something about that one looked a bit familiar ... communications, that was it. That term had to be a carrier-wave modulator, and that one ...

“Max! Max!” broke in on his concentration an unclear time later. Max mounted the ladder and extended his head back out into the world.

“What is it?”

The sun had shifted positions in the sky; instead of rising, it was already starting to descend. “Are you okay?” Jurtan called up.

“Yeah,” said Max. Something beyond the usual was bothering the kid. Mont hadn’t been yelling: he’d been speaking almost softly. “What’s up?”

“I thought it might be you, thought you might be in trouble. The music - something doesn’t feel right.” Jurtan looked nervously over his shoulder back in the direction they’d come from. “Could somebody be following us?”

“Damn!” said Max. He leaned farther out of the hatch, knife in hand, and slashed at the knots he’d tied to hold the net in place. It slipped free and headed for the ground. Mont hopped back in a hurry, and the net just managed to miss his head.

“What are you doing?” Jurtan said.

“I thought we shook them.” Max was still busy with the knife. “Cut that knot! Go!”

“Shook who?” Jurtan reached the tree and hacked once at the rope with his own knife. The loose end began to whip upward.

The other end wasn’t falling, though; Max was hauling the whole thing in. He’d cut loose the cross-tie that had held the cable in place around the pylon. Max’s body still vanished into the empty air at the level of his waist - his torso and head were clear enough, although they were balancing on nothing, but below them was - well, it was weird. The rope was disappearing into the same place his legs would have been. “Them,” said Max. “The Hand. Get down! Can you tell how close they are?”

“You mean someone was following us here? This Hand guy?”

Both ends of the rope slithered upward and popped away into the air. Max withdrew from sight after them. “The Hand isn’t a person, it’s a group,” he hissed. “They’re -”

“We know you’re in there, Maximillian!” The shout came from somewhere across the water surrounding their island. “You might as well come out!”

“Like I said,” Max muttered. “The Hand.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep springing things on me like this,” Jurtan said morosely, face down on the ground beneath the level of the marsh grass.

“Things get sprung on you one way or the other, kid. You get them from me or I can stand out of the way and let life pitch them at you direct, take your pick.”

“We have the island surrounded, Maximillian! Please come out and save us all some trouble, eh, my old friend?”

“Who’s that talking?” whispered Jurtan. “What are we going to do? What are you going to do?”

“Can’t you hold this thing any steadier?” said the Great Karlini.

“Is bird,” said Haddo. “Not is machine.” Karlini had never been nearly as fond of flying as Max, who enjoyed the freedom of clear skies and open air and rushing speed. Not that Karlini disliked all of it - he didn’t mind smooth air, or a straight and level glide, or even high altitude above a totally unsupported free-fall drop. Max was blessed with a thoroughly unruffleable sense of balance, though, and the cast-iron constitution of his inner ear let him actually enjoy the swoops, banks, rolls, stalls, and crash dives of the large scavenger bird that Karlini had, after a fashion, inherited. Haddo - well, who knew what kind of sense of balance Haddo had, anyway, but at the least he seemed to have a solid rapport with the bird, and if the skin beneath his ever-present fuligin black cloak ever turned green (or whatever passed for the color of nausea in Haddo’s circle) he had never given the slightest sign of it. Karlini screwed his eyes shut again, took in a deep slow breath, and tightened his double-armed grip around Haddo’s midsection, conveniently located just ahead of him on the tandem saddle slung across the bird’s shoulders at the base of its long wattled neck. “Constrict not my lung,” Haddo grumbled, but he didn’t actually try to pry Karlini loose from his death-grip hug.

Along with whatever mutation and environmental shift had let the subspecies grow to such a hypertrophic size that they were capable of carrying two fully-grown humans (or a human and a something-else-of-roughly-human-mass-and-shape) and on top of them a limited amount of cargo at the same time, the birds had acquired a different attitude toward the aesthetics of flight than their dwarf ancestors and cousins. Rather than just looping idly around the sky, drifting on updrafts and generally lazing around while they waited for some ground-hugger creature to do them the favor of turning itself into carrion, the giant buzzards now seemed to enjoy executing more strenuous aerial calisthenics. That was paradoxical on the face of it, Karlini thought, because the stresses on the birds’ skeletons and musculature would have increased out of proportion with their increase in size.