Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

“Is everyone ready?” said Zhardann.

“Sure,” I said heartily. Jill, Soaf Pasook, Zhardann, and I were once again in the second-floor study of Zhardann’s place, sitting around the unlit fireplace with our armchairs in a half-circle.

“Ordinarily,” Zhardann said, addressing all of us, “I support the principle of separate arrivals. Certainly the individual entrance reveals the least detail concerning one’s affiliations and confederations, allows the greatest ambiguity about one’s intentions, gives one maximum flexibility for maneuver, or those tastefully yet dramatically timed shifts of direction, and so forth; all worthy goals to be cultivated, we all agree. Anything else is a bit ... jejune, shall we say. Nevertheless, the bold stroke, the dramatic gesture, the small slap at accepted propriety do have their place. The sheer shock value of an unexpectedly explicit statement can make its own message unmistakable.”

Both Jill and Pasook looked impatiently placid, as though they were waiting for Zhardann to get past his rationalization to whatever conclusion he was leading us up to, but were willing to give him the space he wanted. Whenever Jill got restless, I’d noticed, she usually broke in with an unexpectedly explicit remark of her own. From the fact that she was keeping her mouth shut here, I figured she knew what Zhardann was aiming at and had decided to go along with it. For Zhardann’s part, too, I caught from him the feeling of an orator warming up, doing his knee-bends and short sprints, and generally giving himself a running start, as it were.

That was fine with me, too. As far as I was concerned, Zhardann could take all the time he wanted. When he got to the end of his spiel, we’d all have to zap ourselves off to the tribunal of the gods. That feat would give three out of the four of us no problem at all, but of course the three weren’t my immediate concern. The fourth, however, certainly was.

“It is no secret that those of us who aspire to the higher levels of intrigue must be flexible,” Zhardann was saying, in his most convincing and crowd-pleasing voice. “I believe this is a case where the direct application of these maxims is appropriate. I will be specific. In this case, it may be important to impress the gathering with our solidarity and unified purpose right from the outset. Accordingly, we will utilize - that is, I propose a modified group field transfer. Are there any objections?” He glanced around the circle.

He was obviously trying to put himself in a conciliatory frame of mind instead of just going with his usual high-handed peremptory style. If that told me anything about what was coming up, it was that he’d be trying to sway others by force of persuasion rather than telling them dictatorially what to do. That much I’d already guessed, though. I nodded back at him to indicate my own assent, telling him through my offhand manner that the trivial question of means didn’t matter to me one way or the other. Inside, however, I was hoping that group transfer meant Zhardann would be doing the work and I’d just be pulled along for the ride.

“I do say modified group transfer,” Zhardann reminded us. “As I will be the one called on to perform any major work that arises during this synod, it is appropriate not to dilute my strength through extraneous extension. To that end, I will provide the synchronization carrier, but each of us will separately power his own jump. If we are ready, then, let us be off.” He raised his hand and drew it down over his face, waggling his fingers rapidly.

I had barely enough time to say “Ulp” beneath my breath before the cloud appeared above Zhardann’s head. As though spilling out of an invisible box a hand’s-breadth above his hair, a coil of fluffy grayish white dropped down like a python, coiled around itself at the level of Zhardann’s forehead, and spun out into a plump disc. If it was not the identical effect I’d seen him use before, when Jill and I had come upon him in this room shortly after our arrival in Oolsmouth, it was surely a close relation. He’d been using it then for communication, but his body had apparently never moved from the room.

Pasook and Jill were now wearing their own hat-clouds, too, but I had to squint to see them since for some reason my vision had begun to fog and someone had tossed a shade over the lights in the room. No, I realized, that wasn’t it at all! To my surprise, I suddenly became aware that at the top limit of my vision, a fourth cloud was hovering above my own head. I brought my hand up in front of my face as the others were doing and flailed my fingers, as usual not having the slightest idea of what I was really trying to accomplish.

No, that wasn’t right either - and this time that comprehension brought with it a long rolling chill that started at my neck, tracked down my spine, and then flowed over into the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t just that my fingers were not moving randomly at all but with purpose, although that was the case, and it wasn’t that I felt no more in control of events than at the other times when magic had occurred around me, although that was the case, too. The disconcerting realization was that it felt familiar . It felt as though I might have actually done this before.

With all my experience of Gash and his metabolic link, I’d never had a sensation like this before. Could the throughput of the link have somehow been increased to the point where I was getting perceptions piped in from Gash, too? The cloud dropped down over my eyes and the scene went gray, then darker, almost to black. I felt the clammy whisper move lower on my face like the breath of an anesthetic gauze - my smell faded away, my taste, even the caress of air upon my skin. My head was turning - was it? - well, it felt like it was turning, anyway, orienting itself, as a tendril of soft sound eased itself into my left ear, like a conversation heard across a stadium field in the fog. A silvery construction of thin unsupported wire swam vaguely through the cloud around my head. I lifted my other hand - the first was still making its gestures of power, although I couldn’t see it in front of my face, and the grayness had slid over it like a velvet cloud - and tried to pinch the skin on my chest. Had I dematerialized? But I could feel my chest there in the right place; I’d grabbed hard enough to hurt. Instead of pain, though, I’d felt only a dull pull-and-twist.

This was sorcery on a fairly high level of sophistication, I was sure, although Zhardann’s synchronization coordinator - the silver wire thing - had two obvious extra loops as well as a subtle glitch that on closer examination might turn out to be an actual bug. He was guiding us to one of the standard meeting-grounds, that much was straightforward, and I could feel the four of us deploying into a line - Jill on the left, then Zhardann and Pasook, with me holding the right flank - as the arrival zone he’d picked was coming up fast. The imminent-arrival warning went out ahead, and then, and then ...

What had I been thinking about?

My mind lurched after that flickering sense of competence, the momentary feeling that I understood something that was going on ... but whatever it had been, whether my own imagination or something else, it was gone. I felt solidity beneath my feet. The gray nothingness before my eyes lightened and grew transparent, not as if it was actually blowing away as a normal fog might, but more like one of those trick panes of glass that are dark and opaque from one orientation yet become clear when rotated a quarter-turn. I heard conversation and the clink of crystal around me. We had arrived.

I was on the right end of my party, with Soaf Pasook to my immediate left. We were standing on the roughly flat-topped surface of what appeared to be a cumulus cloud, fluffy billows rolling slowly around us and towering above us into the brilliant blue sky. Perhaps two paces to my right the edge of the cloud dropped off, revealing a small meadow of waving green twenty seconds or so of free-fall below. Steep walls of ice and snow-dusted rock ringed the meadow on three sides. The cliff-sides - for so they were - mounted toward the altitude of our position, the central peak in fact overtopping the cloud by a gut-wrenching leap. The whole sight had me by the stomach, to be frank, and the gaps that were opening and closing here and there in the surface of the cloud, showing other aerial vistas of rock and glacier through them far below, did not help to relieve that one bit. Neither did the other mountain ridge toward which the cloud appeared to be drifting in a straight line.