Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

One thing did make more sense, all of a sudden. Zhardann hadn’t hesitated to reveal himself as a solid Conservationist, dedicated to the superiority of gods and the overall status quo. That was exactly what you’d expect from the Curse Administrator, whose power and position stemmed materially from the structure that let gods interfere most directly with the activities of the world.

Zhardann had been building for awhile, but now he’d reached his full scenery-chewing form. “To wander the earth,” he declaimed, “the glories of your past lost forever to you, even the memory of your power gone from you like dust, to be one with those who creep across the ground, as one of them to grow old, to grow feeble, and to die - this is your fate, this is your doom, this is your curse. In my full power and vested authority as Administrator of Curses, Master of Dooms, I pronounce upon you now the dread Curse of Namelessness!”

What? I thought. I’d figured Sapriel was going to meet his doom, but I’d had no idea that the shape of that doom was anything other than physical death. Max hadn’t said anything to imply that the Spell of Namelessness was used by the gods; he’d only talked about it being turned on people. It was an extremely rare and tricky spell, according to Max, which is why he’d only heard and read about it, never actually seen it in action or had the chance to analyze its full specifications. True, Max had implied that a lot of the spells or spell mechanisms used by mortals were also used by the gods; when the gods used them these spells often wound up more powerful, but they weren’t necessarily different in operation or even in name. But theory wasn’t the biggest thing on my mind just then. The question looming in from of me was major, central in fact, and I hadn’t even seen it coming.

Was it possible that what had just been done to Sapriel had, in fact, been done to me too? Could I have misinterpreted everything? Was I originally a god ?

Maybe Jill and Zhardann (or Jardin) really weren’t mistaking me for someone else - maybe they really had known me before the Spell of Namelessness. Before I was mortalized. Maybe they didn’t realize I was under that curse. Maybe these trickles of knowledge and expertise I’d been getting every now and then weren’t leakage through the metabolic link from Gashanatantra after all - maybe they were leakage from my old self making it through the barrier the Spell of Namelessness had thrown up, across the wasteland of my sundered mind.

Get a grip on yourself , I thought shakily; I was starting to sound as florid as Zhardann. Calm down . All this speculation could be nothing more than wishful thinking, wishful that is if you were the kind of person who’d want to be a god in the first place, much less a god tossed out on his ear by his peers. True, from a professional standpoint the Spell of Namelessness sounded more and more like a really useful thing to have around. Sorcerers probably used it on their victims when they wanted an effect from off the usual beaten track, and a magician who knew it could undoubtedly pick up a fair amount of cash by hiring that skill out. For that matter, a spell like that one was most likely part of Jardin the Curse Administrator’s normal repertoire. In fact, it sounded like such a handy bit of spell-work that it was a bit surprising you didn’t see more of it around. On the other hand, maybe you did. Look how long I’d been walking around without any idea I had no memory of my past, or my identity. The inhibiting field it cast on the people around you, keeping them from noticing your lack of name, too, could almost be thought of as the spell’s way of hiding its own identity.

On the other hand, you could understand why maybe the Spell of Namelessness wasn’t used that much, after all. Why spend all this time and effort to put somebody on ice when you might as well just kill them outright? Special cases, sure - you might need your victim around for later use, you might want to have a good time watching your former enemy blunder around with his memory gone, you might be using the Nameless one as bait to snare someone else, you might merely lack the power to eradicate your enemy outright, or you might even have some weird moral compunction about murder. Or, as in the current situation of Sapriel, there could be some standard of behavior, or the restraint of politics. But these were all special cases, without a doubt.

None of the basic facts of my situation had changed, really, but the scope of possibilities had just gotten wider. I still had to assume that whoever had hit me with the Spell remained out there somewhere. They might not be around, true, but that wouldn’t be the smart way to bet. If they weren’t, I just wouldn’t find them, that’s all, but if they were and I didn’t, well, like I said, that wouldn’t be the brightest way to plan. Before the Sapriel development, though, I’d figured I had to be on the lookout for some human enemy from my past, maybe some sorcerer I’d crossed or a warlord who wanted me out of the way and was willing to pay top ool for the job. Now it looked like I’d been thinking too small. Not only might there be a god with a personal vendetta against me indeed, possibly one of these very gods I’d been hobnobbing with just now - but I myself might have been one of them. From what I’d seen of the gods so far, that didn’t seem like anything to get excited about. Of course, that attitude could have been what might have gotten me in trouble in the first place ...

So this was just great. Now I had even more stuff to worry about. It just goes to show you - this was the kind of situation people thought I liked.

Zhardann had choked Sapriel off in mid-wail while he set to work. Judging by the pace he was following, he had come prepared with a loaded Namelessness package, he wasn’t just whipping the thing up from scratch now as we watched. The face of Sapriel’s image was swimming, flowing, melting , merging into a blank featureless expanse, the nose flattening and the eye sockets filling. Suddenly I realized that behind that obvious scene, Sapriel’s mind, too, was flattening, losing definition and resolution beneath an empty fog. Then I realized, too, that Zhardann wasn’t just guiding the Namelessness effect as it continued its lumberjack swath through the forest of Sapriel’s memory, he was watching, monitoring, reading as the structure evaporated away. I knew what he was looking for, too. He wanted to know the location of the ring.

Just watching Zhardann’s face I could tell how it was going; that plus my own intuition. He was discovering that Sapriel really didn’t have the ring, and in fact he never did have it. I didn’t know how much time Zhardann needed, probably not much, but then the hanging ball fell in on itself and the figure that had been Sapriel, its small spin growing into a whirl. There was a marble-sized black spot in the air, then only a puff of dark smoke.

Zhardann continued looking at the place the ball had just vacated for a moment, the look of puzzlement on his face quickly turning hard. I braced myself for what was going to come next, as soon as the meeting broke up, and he had his chance to come after Pasook and me again. I could still almost feel Zhardann’s mind ticking over. Pasook had said that Sapriel had taken the ring. Either he was lying, or for some reason Sapriel’s memory had been edited after the fact. That could be possible, too - someone who had stolen the ring from Sapriel could have hidden his tracks by papering over the appropriate memories in Sapriel’s mind.

At least those were thoughts I assumed were running past Zhardann’s attention. In all these tangled webs, I had to remind myself that none of these folks had ever had the ring in the first place, or at least hadn’t had it since Max and I had acquired it in Roosing Oolvaya.