Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

I’d been wondering why I hadn’t heard anything from him. There was no clear reason he’d want to leave his metabolic link active indefinitely, since it had to be a drain on his resources, yet as far as I could tell it was still perfectly intact. Now I knew. He was still using me as a decoy. The woman hadn’t recognized me , per se, she’d recognized the trace of Gash that was flavoring my aura through the link. She thought I was really him. She thought the taste of Gash’s own aura I was still carrying was really a little bit of his true identity trickling through an otherwise comprehensive disguise. That ring business he’d set me up with before had been pretty tricky, but it was looking like I hadn’t seen anything yet. At least the ring bit was business; this mess seemed unmistakably personal. What had I ever done to him?

There was another reasonable explanation though, as long as I was running through the range of possibilities. She could have merely been out of her mind. I liked this explanation even less than the others. She had struck me as both a powerful and a nasty customer, and that was assuming her activities had some rational reasoning behind them. If she was delusional or outright insane, well, my best bet was to start finding out if I remembered any good prayers. After falling in with Max and Shaa I’d gone back and made a few back payments to Phlinn Arol, the Adventurer’s God, just in case, but I had no idea if that had put me into his favor or not, or if I’d ever even been there in the first place. The gods work in mysterious ways, they say, which I always figured was just as well. Of course, back then I hadn’t yet gotten in the habit of staring across my own desk at gods who were working mysteriously on me. “It’s been a long time,” I said. “When we last spoke …”

“I know,” she said. “I know you told me you never wanted to see me again. I know you hated me because of that time with Kortese.”

She paused. I fixed her with a stern gaze. She swallowed, and said, “Do you think I would tempt your wrath without a very good reason?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “would you? Here you are, and yet I haven’t heard the barest hint of any kind of reason, good or otherwise, wouldn’t you admit? As you saw fit to bring up, I suppose we are married, or at least someone might try to make that case, but what does it really mean, anyway? And let us not forget your initial greeting. I would say that smacked more of the preemptive first strike than a preamble to polite conversation, hmm?”

Her gaze was perhaps less sardonic, less sure of itself than it had been at the outset. “All right, then, I’ll be direct. I want the ring. If I could have taken it off your smoking body I would have.”

“Ah,” I said. “Now we appear to be getting somewhere. But where, indeed? There are many rings floating about, and even a few worth blasting one’s in-laws over. Which one do you have in mind? And why do you think I might have it?”

“Don’t start playing games,” she snapped. “You know perfectly –”

“No games?” I said in an aggrieved tone. “Just what did you expect, pray tell? If you know me at all, my dear, you know that convolution is my life’s blood, so to speak.” I was riding the odds. Shaa had told me something of Gash’s reputation as the Mad Plotter, the Devious, master of stratagems and counterplots. “I’m rather disappointed in you, you know. I’d have thought during your association with me something might have rubbed off. Instead, what am I met with? A frontal assault, if an expectedly weak one, followed by a retreat to declarative statements? Oh dear, oh dear.” I tsk’d at her once or twice for good measure.

She looked at me, and in her face I read a mixture of emotions. On the surface was a flush of rage, no doubt aimed at me, no doubt well-earned by my belittling remarks. Beneath that was her initial layer of arrogance torn through now by the shreds of doubt. Beneath that , though, was something else, rising up like a leviathan from the great depths of the ocean. Like the hidden leviathan, it made only the barest ripple on the surface; unlike the leviathan, which stays in the deep water because it can’t breathe in the air, she was deliberately hiding this particular emotion, which meant, by extension, that she was deliberately letting the other emotions show. What was she up to?

“As long as you’re being declarative,” I continued, “I’ll try to play your game, how’s that? What did you think you were doing when you walked in here? Why did you bother to attack in the first place? You knew you’d never lay me out with your power alone.”

“No,” she said. “You’re right.” Suddenly her original nasty smirk was back. No, more than that. Suddenly the leviathan had emerged from the abyss, hurling its mass clear of the water in a thunderclap of shrapnel spray. “That’s why I brought this .” She reached into the air, her hand sliding into a spot above the center of the desk and disappearing from sight along a neat dividing line as though she’d stuck her hand behind an invisible wall, giving me a good angle to view the rest of her wrist and then her forearm in a cross-sectional, apparently severed state. The view of chopped-off muscles and pulsing arteries, and the yellow of living bone, made me sorry Shaa wasn’t around to fully appreciate it; I prefer my anatomy neatly confined to outer surfaces. I didn’t have to watch that particular parlor trick for long, though, since she quickly grasped the thing she sought in the invisible compartment and drew it out into sight.

A mass of writhing worms was my first impression, gray and black and ceaselessly squirming and making a disgusting squelching sound; I hoped it wouldn’t start oozing ichor all over the desk. Then I realized that the worm ball might not be solid at all, since the worms seemed to be freely passing through each other at will, overlapping and parting like the multiple images from a particularly rotten barrel of fermented oat rotgut scarfed down in the kind of long flashy swig that would probably leave you unconscious at its conclusion, either from lack of fresh air or the unmitigated kick of the brew itself, and if it didn’t leave you sprawled insensate on the floor you’d wish it had. The worms were treating her hand with respect, not trying to merge with her flesh, only their own, but as I noted that fact I also realized that a sparkling film had appeared over her hand and arm like a painted-on glove. The glove effect was one I hadn’t seen before in my limited experience with magic, and since I had no idea how to duplicate it myself I had a feeling that the worms might not treat my flesh with the same level of restraint.

It did look impressive, I had to admit. However, the effect was to some degree lost on me, since I unfortunately didn’t have the slightest idea of what the wormball actually was, other than more trouble, but that much was only common sense. Gash, I was sure, would have recognized it immediately; he was that kind of guy, and it did sound like the sort of thing that would be up the line of his professional specialization. He still didn’t seem to be around, unfortunately, and he sure wasn’t sending any helpful messages either. “So.” I said, “you’ve got a new toy. Do you expect me to collapse at your feet, to beseech you in tones of supplication?”

She peered at me, momentarily nonplussed. Her eyes took a quick glance at the worm thing, almost as though she wanted to make sure it was really there, and active; I half expected her to shake it to see if it would rattle. She didn’t. Instead she fixed that grin firmly on her face and extended the thing toward me. I felt a sudden flush of heat as though the door to an oven had been opened in front of my face. Unlike an oven, I didn’t feel the sensation on the surface of my skin, but down behind my eyes in the center of my skull.