Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

Karlini adjusted his posture, balanced uncomfortably as he was on the front edge of the sagging couch; he didn’t know what might try to climb down his pants if he put more of himself in contact with the cushions, and especially their back recesses. “Well, you may not have been able to find that communicator magician of yours, Sy Gazoont, but I’m here, and Shaa’s on the way in, too. I’ll tell you about that in a minute. And - wait a second. Does the Council still meet in that Hall of the People place? The one with all the scavenged pre-Dislocation stuff, with that round meeting chamber and the metal floor?”

“Yes,” said Julio, “exactly so. Why do you ask? Do you have something in mind?”

“Maybe,” Karlini said. “I think I do. Look, Haddo, can you get back in touch with Fa - with that other fellow you know?”

“Could be,” Haddo said cautiously. “Idea what is?”

“Okay, listen to this …”

So there I was.

Squirm as I might, and I’d been doing a lot of that, I can assure you, my alternatives still looked as limited as they’d been all along. There was no doubt I’d been getting a little carried away with the current skullduggery, and especially with the luck that had continued to roll my way since we’d arrived in Oolsmouth. True, Soaf Pasook hadn’t turned up yet. The closer I got to roping him in, though, the closer I got to the problematic moment when Zhardann and Jill confronted him only to discover he didn’t know anything about the ring or his supposed collaboration with me in my presumptive role as Gashanatantra; when that happened, the jig would be up. Even if they merely managed to catch up with Sapriel, the god who was apparently behind the raid on Pasook, my story would be blown as soon as he told them his attack had had nothing to do with some crummy ring.

What was the alternative, though? I could just try to bug out, leaving Oolsmouth and Jill and Zhardann. I wasn’t sure I could; it wasn’t clear that they’d let me. Also, the time hadn’t been a total loss in itself. I’d been finding out some very interesting new details about the gods, and potentially about my own situation. After all, Gashanatantra had to be involved here one way or the other, either through Jill, his wife, Zhardann, his look-alike, Pasook, his supposed associate, or Sapriel, whose raid on Pasook could theoretically have been an attempt to get at Gashanatantra himself at second hand. For that matter, if you wanted to think deviously enough, in a sufficient haze of double-back stratagems and tricky schemes, the motivation behind Sapriel’s strike could have been aimed at Gash through his contact with me.

I realized there was a chance I’d been hanging around these folks too much. Their own reflexive double-crossing and check-behind-your-back mentality was certainly rubbing off.

Still, that didn’t change the fact that my involvement with Zhardann had put me in a position to have a chance at helping out Groot, and by extension Karlini, Shaa, et al . But the closer I came to Pasook or Sapriel, the closer things were going to be cut. The significant danger, of course, was that the things to feel that blade were going to be extremities attached to my own body.

Not that I had a choice, really. The way to play this out was to keep on moving along with them, doubts and questions or not, on the trail of the ring, or to be more precise, the wild-goose chase after the ring I knew wasn’t there. It was somewhere , that much I did know, but it sure wasn’t in the corner of the woods we were looking. In the midst of my own fancy footwork, danced in reaction to the steps I’d been confronted with, my basic hope was that I hadn’t outsmarted myself and left myself in the process of tripping over my own pair of left feet. The more twists this thing took, the harder it was getting to remember who’d heard which story and how I was supposed to act with them, and who-all I had to worry about actually showing up on the scene.

I’d convinced Jill and Zhardann that I (whom they assumed to be Gashanatantra) had been in league with a partner, and that the partner had double-crossed me and now had the ring we’d teamed up to obtain. I’d let them decide for themselves who this partner actually was, trying to seem cryptic as part of the process, and now here we were, struggling to track this mythical partner down. The main thing that could happen to get me off the hook would be to encounter the real person they thought I was. Coming across the authentic Gash could be a mixed blessing at best for me. Not only could he blow my assumed cover if he wanted, but knowing him even to the superficial extent I did, he’d probably take immediate and dire remedial action for my hubris in impersonating him in the first place, even though it had been done involuntarily and by default. The same could be the case, of course, if the new guy with whom I was now involved who looked identical to Gash, the one I knew as Zhardann, turned out to have been Gash himself all along; in that case, though, I would probably turn out to have been part of Gash’s ongoing scheme myself anyway. There was simply nothing I could do about it.

“This is the address,” I stated.

It had been close enough for an easy walk from Zhardann’s place. Zhardann or his agents had done well in choosing the house on the Lane of Wealth as the site for his base of Oolsmouth operations; not only was it convenient to the city center, it had turned out to be agreeably close to several other locations I could see myself having the need to visit. The first of these had been the home of Meester Neville Hanglebord Dooglas, erstwhile Councillor and adversary of the incarcerated Groot, in front of which Jill and I now stood.

I’d already taken a turn around Oolsmouth seeing the local sights, of course, and between Julio and Zhardann’s local contact, who was now on call back at the house, I’d heard enough about Dooglas himself to formulate some idea of what to expect, so I was not exactly rocked back in astonishment to see where the street address and the directions had actually brought us. The wall around the block was stone, and what we had been able to see of the main building as we approached, before we got so close that the looming bulk of the wall shielded it from sight, was hacked from rock as well; rock, and a lot of it.

“How do you propose to get in there?” Jill asked, implying by her delivery that she was humoring a fool, and that a minute from now she’d step in to sweep me away and tidy things up the way a competent person would have arranged it in the first place; not to be catty, but this was frankly looking to be her usual tone.

“Not by breaking and entering, if that’s what your question had in mind.”

“Isn’t that what detectives do?”

“Sometimes,” I said, walking on down the sidewalk toward the guard booth I could see protruding onto the sidewalk where the driveway entered the compound from the street. Jill lengthened her stride to match me. “Detecting isn’t a one-trick affair,” I went on. “You have to have a whole repertoire of possibilities.”

“You’re not planning to ask them to let you in?” she said mockingly.

“Why not?” I said. “I washed my face.” I’d also borrowed a fancy cloak from the stock of clothing that had come with the house, royal blue with a crimson lining and a fur-trimmed ruff; not what I think of as my best colors, but it had a certain overstated touch of flagrancy about it that I thought was well-suited to the prevailing Oolsmouth style. “If you want, though, I’m willing to let you pull your part of the weight, rather than hogging all the pleasure for myself.”

“I’m having my own fun watching you squirm,” she told me.