Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

Good gods, I thought. Could this be the missing Soaf Pasook?

Who else could it be?

But why was he validating the details of that made-up story I’d told Zhardann and Jill?

“Indeed we do,” I said in a noncommittal tone.

“The situation is different now, of course,” he continued, “and I for one am looking forward with no little anticipation to assisting your new group in the matter of Sapriel. I have no doubt that in the process we will succeed in recovering the ring, and who knows what else may -”

Jill was still in the doorway. “ Another partner?” she said.

“Not just a partner,” Zhardann said. His fingers steepled in front of his face, a pleasant smile of the sort I hadn’t seen any evidence he was capable of displaying on his face, he was radiating an aura of, well, outright warmth . Even I knew him well enough by this time to see he was trying to focus all his faculties on buttering up the new guy. Pasook. My own stomach was doing flip-flops. “From what we were discussing when you came in, it is clear that he has significant grievances, grievances of substance, grievances, even, of general significance. With his willingness to issue a formal complaint, my own empowerment is such that I may convene a statutory tribunal of arbitration. An enforceable tribunal.”

From the way Zhardann was staring at Jill as he expounded, I thought he was telling her to follow his lead and he’d explain everything later. She wasn’t buying it. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” she stated. “Tribunals have a way of getting out of hand.”

Zhardann waved his hand as if clearing away a stray wisp of smoke. “Nothing that can’t be handled, and the battleground would be ours. This would be a first-class chance to force Sapriel to a confrontation of our own choosing.”

“Are you sure you want the question of the ring brought up in public forum?”

“Scarcely public , my dear.”

“ Semi -public, then,” Jill snorted. “Airing the real story - even part of the real story - don’t tell me you don’t think that’s dangerous. If – when - the ring’s current owner gets identified, everybody in on the debate is going to take off after him or her.”

“That risk can be mitigated,” said Zhardann, a little of his customary irritation poking through his sunny demeanor. “What are we here for, tell me, if not to take that risk?”

“What indeed?” I contributed. “Well put.”

Both Zhardann and Jill swung toward me with a startled flinch, as though they might have forgotten for a moment that I was there. The new guy had never entirely taken his eyes and his small smile of internal amusement off me. Jill opened her mouth to lash back at my contribution, no doubt, but then paused, narrowed her gaze, looked more closely at me, turned and directed the same scrutiny on the new guy, and then glanced back and forth once again. “Are you two related?” she said.

“Related?” said the guy, aiming his pleasant smile at her. “Aren’t we all?”

“Do you really think so?” I added. I thought I’d been doing a good job of maintaining my air of know-it-allness and I wasn’t about to cash it all in over one out-of-the-hinterlands remark, but I would really have liked to be able to ask her just what similarity she felt she’d detected. I didn’t find any obvious correspondence in physical appearance between the two of us, but at this stage of the game I knew that was no evidence one way or the other. Reasoning from the way my own situation had evolved, these gods were used to changing bodies, or at least to changing the way their standard bodies appeared, so Jill must have thought there was some other familial relationship that would remain constant between physical redos. Probably she was looking at whatever characteristics she had recognized me by in the first place. Something in our auras?

She flashed me a sharp-edged grin with a few too many teeth showing. “My husband never liked to discuss family,” she said to no one in particular, “even when our relationship was such that we discussed anything .”

“Family is relative,” I said, a bit lamely, even for me.

“It’s not a strong similarity, at that.” Jill said finally.

“One can occasionally get some degree of aural overlap merely from close collaboration,” the guy said in a helpful tone. “When the two of us were examining the opportunity of Pod Dall -”

Pasook , I thought. No question about it. Or someone who thought he was Pasook. Or someone who thought it was in his interest to think he was Pasook.

“- and particularly later, during the engineering of the ring - well, there was a certain bidirectional flow, wouldn’t you say?”

He was talking to me, I realized with a start. “Well, yes,” I said, “the ring itself, being fairly tricky, and not of merely incidental interest from a purely technical perspective, did require more than the usual level of effort.”

“Yes,” Pasook said, “quite. After all, the design did have to be robust enough to suck up one of us, and a leading Death, at that. A nice piece of work. Nontrivial, if I do say so.”

“You never used to be that adroit a technician.” Jill said to me. “Was your old behavior just a pose? Did you distrust me that far back?”

“Some of us can learn,” I commented.

“What do you mean by that?” she snapped.

“Why, nothing,” I said, “nothing at all. I thought learning was supposed to be one of those virtues with no downside, something we were all in favor of as a matter of principle. At least among ourselves, for ourselves.”

“He is good, though, you know,” said Pasook. “The system that stabilizes the confinement matrix, for example - what did you call it?”

“I thought we agreed those were all trade secrets.”

“Oh, come, come,” he said. “We’re all associates here now.”

I realized now what he was doing. He was trying to force me to reveal how much I really knew about the ring, like whether I knew enough to have actually had my hands on it. Both Pasook and I knew that the storyline he was holding to was a fabrication. Neither of us could tell that to Jill and Zhardann, of course, so he was able to use my reluctance to risk blowing my own cover story to lever me into helping him with his hunt for the ring. At least that was the way it seemed to shake out, lacking a stray inconsistent detail or two. I didn’t know how much he actually knew, but in any case I was trapped. He’d backed me into a corner; I had to say something that sounded plausible or I’d raise serious suspicions. Fortunately, I had hung around with Max and Shaa enough while they were analyzing the ring to learn something about its matrix construction. “The parasitic catalysis shunt,” I said. “The power of the ring’s occupant is synchronized with the on-board master-wave and used to boost the circumscription field. It’s like one of those woven puzzles made of straw, the kind where you stick a finger in each end and then can’t pull it back out again - the occupant’s own power is used to immobilize themselves. That’s also the reason the ring looked so innocuous while it was empty, before the trap was sprung; so innocuous that a notoriously sneaky victim could actually be convinced to pick it up. In its primed state, the confinement matrix was folded in its unpowered quiescence mode with virtually nothing protruding, especially above the countermeasures clutter. When it was triggered, though, the feedback expansion let loose along with the -”

“Rather diabolical, really,” said Pasook, his voice filled with admiration. He was trying to butter me up, now, or at least to make Jill and Zhardann think he was. On the other hand, he might have been genuinely impressed with my clatter of jargon. If he knew anything solid about the ring, though, more than deduction or speculation, he’d understand that my exposition had been the authentic article. Up to a point. “But you will appreciate - indeed, it goes without saying - that the technicalities of the hardware were less important than the target.”