Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

The seconds ground slowly past. I felt like something invisible was trying to mash me backward through the wall, but that my body was shrugging off the pressure with the well-mortared firmness of a barricade of bricks. It could have just been my mental state. It could have been, but I knew it wasn’t. Unless I missed my guess, the metabolism link Gashanatantra had hooked between us was automatically drawing on his own personal protection field. At the moment, the shunt that linked us appeared to actually be giving me some help; if so, it was just about the first time. Fortunately, the protection effect was totally automatic. My own attempts to draw deliberately on the link had primarily revealed that where magic was concerned I had deep reservoirs of total incompetence whose surfaces I had barely begun to scratch. There was one thing I could do, though, that fell in my own department. Rather than merely glower at the woman by the door, or let my jaw assume its practiced wide-open position on my chest, I forced my face into something approaching a sarcastic grin. I figured the effect was less than completely successful on the sarcasm front, but I was hoping the subtle element of mockery I was aiming for would balance that out.

After a moment whose true length I wouldn’t have ventured to guess, the eyes across the room narrowed. Her fingers folded inward as the tortured air in her hands rippled and became clear. The pressure against my body eased. “So,” she remarked. Her voice had the tenor of a violin string plucked with a pick of broken glass, smooth and lyrical above a whiplash spike.

I kept my grin from widening with relief; this had probably been only the starter. “So,” I said also, for good measure.

“‘So?’ All you can say is ‘So?’ I’d have thought better of you, you , always so proud of your reputation for having the perfect thing to say at the right time. Or do I still hold that much of a spell over you?” She tilted her head up and to one side and chuckled, but her chuckle held a disturbing hint of some nasty joke in it, barely contained.

“My reputation is occasionally expanded in the telling,” I temporized. As far as I knew, I had never seen her before in my life.

“In a way.” said the woman, “I suppose this was the perfect refuge for you. I’m almost embarrassed how long it took to track you down.” That’s what she said , but she didn’t look embarrassed at all.

“Really,” I said. “How nice. I’m sorry I put you to so much trouble. To what exactly do I owe the honor of all that effort, as well as the pleasure of your visit?”

“Now that I see you I’d know you anywhere,” she said musingly. “Even if you do have a different body, even if you are hiding out in a rattrap room in a flea-infested town. Scarcely your style at all, which is, of course, the beauty of it. I can even understand your not giving me a proper greeting. Rest assured, though, my dear, certain things can survive any number of new bodies. Come over here and kiss me.”

I tried to keep the gagging feeling in my throat from becoming loud enough to be heard across the room. “Don’t you think that should wait?” I said instead, hoping I didn’t sound too much like a drowning frog.

She scowled. It was a mean scowl. I was glad it wasn’t directed at me, only at whoever she thought I was. I was only sorry that whoever that really was didn’t happen to be around at the moment. “Very well,” she said finally. “So that’s the way you’re going to be about it. I would have thought you would let yourself unbend that far, but then again, I do know you, so perhaps not. Nevertheless,” and the scowl crawled again toward her equally nasty grin, “I am still your wife.”

“How are you feeling?” said Jurtan Mont.

“When one considers the alternatives,” said Zalzyn Shaa, “not too bad.” He plopped down to sit on a convenient rock. “After all, look around us.” A sweep of his arm took in the shrub-covered hillside, the neat patches of farmland falling away from them in long cultivated waves, the low gorge of the River Oolvaan and the beginnings of the mountains beyond, and, slightly downstream to their right, the sprawl and bustle of Roosing Oolvaya.

“Yeah,” said Mont, following Shaa’s gesture, “what?”

“Come now. Surely you have more of an aesthetic sense than that. Or have I been wasting my time on a toad?”

Mont dropped the sack containing the herbs Shaa had been collecting next to the rock and lowered himself to the ground. “Okay, it’s a nice view, but what does that have to do with how your heart is?”

“If one is going to push one’s limits,” Shaa said sagely, “one might as well do it where there’s something pleasant to look at. If one’s limits obligingly retreat, then the pleasant vista can serve as sufficient instant gratification for attempting the exercise in the first place. Even if the limits remain in force, one can at least console oneself with the thought that one might easily not have anything to look at at all, pleasant or otherwise.”

“So you’ve got more energy?” Shaa had set a fairly brisk pace up the hill. “Your breathing seems pretty good.”

“To complain would seem churlish,” Shaa agreed. At least, Mont thought that’s what he was doing; it was always hard to tell with Shaa. “Have you finished packing?”

Mont grimaced. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t even know what I should be packing anyway.”

“Whatever you can carry without unduly aggravating the horse.”

“Why do I have to be going on a horse? I don’t like horses.”

“Neither does Max,” said Shaa. “However, he is less fond of walking. It’s known as a trade-off.”

“Well, I don’t like Max either. Why can’t I be going with you? Why do I have to go to start with?”

Shaa opened the sack, peered within, fingered thoughtfully through his latest collection of weeds, selected one slender stalk of dusty and purple-edged green, mashed its bulbous end between his thumb and forefinger, and inserted the oozing tip in the comer of his mouth. “Did you ask a question?” he said.

“You’re like trying to punch smoke, you know that?” Jurtan said. “You know perfectly well I asked a question.”

Shaa rolled the weed around with his tongue for a moment before responding. “Maximillian has, rather valiantly I might add, offered to assist in your seasoning. I’m not sure I understand why, but then I’m not certain I understand why I’ve been spending so much of my own time with you when you persist in being so urchinish. There are some who would pay for the opportunity that is being thrust upon you gratis, but from your lips does a word of thanks fall? Not in my hearing, and I venture not in anyone else’s either.”

“I never said I wanted to be an adventurer,” said Mont, “or whatever you all think you are, and I don’t particularly want to try to fight with a sword. I’d rather work on the - well, the other stuff.”

“They are not, as you are well aware, mutually exclusive, and the swordwork may not only help to occupy you on the way to the big time, but may help you when we get there.”

“The big time? I thought we were going to the City of the Empire.”

“Merely a synonym,” Shaa said, “as you may come to appreciate if you survive, a state which may have something to do with your not exasperating one of us beyond the bounds of our professional courtesy.”

“Well, excuse me for living,” Mont said sarcastically. Shaa was pleased to note that his command of the proper tone was improving. Then again, of course, as Shaa didn’t mind acknowledging, he did have more than one expert teacher. “But what if this adventuring stuff isn’t for me, anyway? I mean, you’ve got an excuse. You’ve got your curse.”