Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

Then I had it. “Sapriel was lynched,” I blurted out. “Unless I’m missing something big, he didn’t do enough to justify being demolished like that. When it came right down to it, nobody even bothered to hear his defense.”

“Of course he was; of course it was a sham. Haven’t you learned anything? Pasook had isolated himself from support but so had Sapriel. Why else do you think he’d have launched so shaky a plot, and relied on human support, of all things? He had nowhere else to turn.” Gash flashed his carnivore smile again. “Perhaps he had help he didn’t realize in reaching that state.”

“Perhaps he did,” I said. “You mean to say everybody at that meeting had it in for him? No, there’d have been some of them who were there because they’d gotten in position to scavenge some of his holdings, right? And some of them had to be there just for the kicks.”

“You see?” Gash said approvingly. “You have been paying attention.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I said. “What about Jill? She thought she’d know you anywhere, but she thought I was you and then didn’t recognize you when you actually showed up.”

“She doesn’t know me nearly as well as she thinks she does,” Gash said.

“Zhardann, then, what about him? You look different now than the last time - I assume at the moment you look like the real Soaf Pasook - but why did you look before the way Zhardann does now?”

The way he looked at me, past the fiery disk of the unleashed sword Monoch, made me think my moment of grace was just about at an end, if it hadn’t expired already. “This interview is over,” he said.

“Are we going to meet again?”

He continued to scowl at me. “Oh, very well,” he said, instead of what I’d expected. “Verisimilitude.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“Jardin does insurance,” Gash said. “I don’t. Insurance was one reason I was in Roosing Oolvaya when we met before, if you recall.”

“Uh, yeah, I do. But I thought Zhardann was the Curse Administrator.”

“How much business do you think someone can find administering major curses? Insurance gives a much more regular stream of income.” He let Monoch slow in his twirlings and stretched his left shoulder up, back, around; I heard a squeaking sound like stretching taffy. Gash lifted up his tunic with his left hand and scratched along the side of his ribs. The fresh scars, the stigmata of needles, the flayed skin were like a fading image painted on a fresh canvas; as he eased his hand along his side, the skin rippled and smoothed behind it. He gave a final scratch, tugged his shirt back down, and let Monoch begin to whine again.

“What you said back at Zhardann’s place - how if there were gods over you the way your lot is over us, they’d be pretty upset with you all - did you mean that?”

“You of all people should know better than to believe what one of us says,” Gash told me severely.

“But if Zhardann could mortalize Sapriel over a case of bad etiquette, wouldn’t evidence of outright heresy -”

“After the things I said to them, mortalization would be the least of my concerns,” Gash said, in the driest tones I’d heard from him.

“Why did you do it, then, why did you bother? I mean, no one knows it was really you , of course, but it was a little off the subject. Why even raise the problem?”

“You’re the inquisitive fellow,” said Gash. “Aren’t you interested in politics?” He suddenly paused in his fancy maneuvers with Monoch, and something else seemed to pass between them. Then he swung the sword again and let go. As Monoch cartwheeled up into the air and then came down in a trajectory aimed directly toward my face, Gash said, over the whine of released power, “Here. Let him go with you for now.”

I got my hand up, and instead of following my natural instinct to cover my eyes and fall to one side out of the way, an instinct that I knew wouldn’t have saved me since I’d seen the kind of fancy footwork the sword could execute when it was seriously going after somebody, I opened my fingers and grabbed. The hilt of the sword smashed into my palm. I slapped my other hand around it for good measure; even so, the sword threw me to the floor, the two of us knocking over the armchair in the process. Monoch was loose and excited and I knew that was a bad combination, but I managed to snarl the shutdown command as we began to tangle ourselves up in the rug. When the sword’s whine faded and I pulled the rug off my head, I discovered that Gash was gone.

There was one more obvious thing I could have asked him, if I’d had the chance, but it was just as well I didn’t bother; I figured I knew the answer clearly enough and I wanted to keep being alive to appreciate it. Somebody had floated the rumor that had set Sapriel on the warpath, the rumor that Pasook had the ring in the first place. I hadn’t been sure who’d been in the position to do that, who had both the knowledge and the inclination, but now I figured there was little doubt it had been Gashanatantra himself. Gash had fed me the same story too, through the metabolic link, and I’d had enough exposure to the way he worked now to be pretty sure why. A lot of it had actually been true.

Gash and Pasook had indeed teamed up to go after Pod Dall and turn him into a ring. Pasook had double-crossed Gash, perhaps using the late Oskin Yahlei as his pawn, which is where I had come in originally. Gash wasn’t the kind of guy to let a double-cross go unavenged, though, and he’d seen the chance to take down two enemies with the same plot - Pasook and Sapriel - using me again as his own pawn and surrogate. Gash still didn’t have the ring, though. If he’d been keeping close enough tabs on me, he had to know where it was. He could be biding his time before taking it back. He could have decided, too, that it was in a safe enough place for the moment, and that it was succeeding perfectly well in stirring up nastiness without even having to be present. On the other hand, I was sure he’d been out of commission for a while after I’d hit him with the backlash zap, so maybe the ring’s transfer and current location had escaped his scrutiny. If that was true, why hadn’t he asked me about it?

You could say that if the first shoe was the stuff he’d pushed me into in Roosing Oolvaya, the other shoe had already dropped with the mess I’d just gone through. I didn’t know how big Gash’s closet was, though, or even how many scheming feet he had. Things had now gotten more confused than they’d been before, and the field was larger. That’s why I couldn’t escape the feeling that a veritable hailstorm of hurtling footwear was converging on my head. All I’d felt so far was the first small ones, the little ones that patter down gently just before the torrent hits.

On the other hand, perhaps I was just being optimistic.

It had not gone badly; no, not badly at all. Which wasn’t to say that it had gone right , or couldn’t have gone better. Still not an operation with which to be unhappy, especially when one considered that one was recovering from recently being dead at the same time as the exercise was running its course.

The servant slipped silently back into the dining room through the kitchen door and carefully removed the plate, stacking the used silverware neatly atop it first, also without the vaguest hint of clatter or clink. She didn’t want to cross him again, Fradjikan reflected; no one did. If they were smart, that is, and of course if they were still alive to have the second chance. It was good to be alive.

He swirled the wine in his glass, admiring its rich deep red color, its attractive if somewhat forward raspberry-tinged nose. Cabernet with a blend of merlot, surely, but what was that distinctive? - oh, of course, almost as much cabernet franc as sauvignon, that would certainly do it, A bit gutsy behind a youthful streak of tannin, but the tannin along with the acidity gave it a tight backbone, an overall supple texture with a slightly peppery, spicy finish. Ah. Of the many things Fradi had been glad to leave behind in his old body, the gout and the inexorable dulling of his palate, which between them had not only left everything tasting mournfully bland but had provided a next-day residue of extreme joint pain, had been two lumps that had made the greatest dent in his ability to appreciate the worthwhile parts of life. Now, though - ah.