Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

She was, I could tell. She looked real happy. I figured the reluctant self-incrimination and embarrassing abasement of an admission of failure would sit well with her, considering her current attitude toward me, particularly since her alertness might be slightly clouded by the pain of the worm burns. But would she take the bait?

In the midst of her glee, her face assumed a thoughtful air. “Do you mean who I think you mean?” she said.

I wanted to say, “If you think I mean who you think I mean, than I think you catch my meaning,” or words to that effect, but somehow I thought it would spoil the tenor of the exchange we were having. Instead I simply raised an eyebrow, tossed her a smile and left it at that for her to chew on.

I watched her mastications for a moment before I decided to give the cauldron another quick stir and toss in an extra pinch of seasoning. “As I’m sure you’ll be pleased to have me admit, I felt unable to go and retrieve the ring myself, single-handed, lest I risk annihilation more closely than you will remember I prefer. I had pretty much written the thing off, if you want to know the truth. As I said, brushing against annihilation isn’t worth it for a ring. Your coming here today and pressing the issue has made me reconsider, however. With you, your partners and myself united, we may very well be able to succeed where I by myself had preferred to back away.”

“How would we divide the ring? Why would you want to get involved with another partnership, after you’ve just admitted the last one fell apart on you?”

“I don’t know how much you really know about this ring,” I said. “Just let me say that its benefits do not have to be limited to one bearer. Aside from that, though, the issue for me is no longer merely one of the ring itself. There are reputations to think of, and accounts, you will agree, to settle.”

“We’ve never worked a job before,” she commented, “not even when we sort of got along. Do you think it’s a good idea to be talking about doing that now?”

“No,” I said. “Do you?”

She gave me an actual grin, for a change. “I don’t either,” she told me.

“Good,” I said. “Then we’re agreed. The situation speaks for itself. I’m willing to admit I haven’t been in my peak form, primarily due to lack of motivation. If I’m being sloppy and you can’t even get me to give up a ring I don’t have, you’re never going to pry it loose by yourselves from the one who does have it. Let’s go talk to your partners. They’re hanging around somewhere in town, right?”

She gave a crisp nod and headed for the door. I grabbed Monoch and followed her. I picked up the pack I’d leaned next to the door earlier, when I’d come in to look things over before my rendezvous with Max, and closed the door behind my back. I didn’t turn around, even though I suspected I’d never set foot in that room again. Like I said before, sentimentality about that crummy office was the last thing I thought I could afford right then.

I knew I’d never carry this off over an extended period of time. I didn’t know who the players were and I had only the most rudimentary insight into the real nature of the game. At the moment, though, long-range planning didn’t occupy nearly the same priority for me as the short-term question of staying alive and un-crisped through each successive minute. Maybe I’d set something in motion and maybe not, and even if I had let something interesting loose I didn’t know if it would wind up in a brief shoving match or an all-out war of the gods, as grandiose as that sounds; all I was hoping for was enough confusion to slip myself off the hook I’d found myself dangling from by the collar of my coat. Whatever it was I might have expected, I had the uneasy suspicion that the true outcome was going to develop into something else entirely.

I’m not perfect, never claimed to be; all I try to do is learn from my mistakes and not to make the same ones over again. The problem is that like most folks, I’m creative. I’ve got a totally demoralizing talent for coming up with entirely new mistakes even worse than the old ones. I wondered just which one I was sticking my foot into this time. I’d seized the initiative, true, or at least I thought I had, and so I was heading out toward the next trial in a better position than I’d hoped. Like I said, I’d known when she’d walked in the door that the only way she’d be walking out alone would be if I was dead; she wasn’t just going to stroll peacefully out of my life and let me go back to whatever I’d been doing. So we were leaving together, but we were doing it more as a mutual standoff and less as her dragging me. The end result was the same, but the game of position between us had me with the marginally better hand. It was a circular argument, of course. The spot my “better hand” had put me in was off the ladder and onto the high wire.

We headed west through Roosing Oolvaya, on foot, away from the river and toward the caravan grounds. I’d been hoping we’d pass someone I knew so I could try to slip him a message, but I hadn’t really believed that particular hope would pan out, and of course it didn’t. Roosing Oolvaya went through its normal routine of waking up, stretching, and getting about its business around us. Carts with fresh produce, pens of cackling chickens, and once even a tank of live droop-whiskered fish clattered past on their way to the central market; a little late in the morning for the fish to be arriving, perhaps, but apparently someone thought it made sense. As we drew closer to the west gate that let onto the caravan grounds, though, traffic got tighter and denser until we were virtually clawing our way upstream. At the gate - in fact, right in the middle of the gate - the explanation revealed itself.

Two wagons were mashed up together in a pile of loose wheels and fragments of wood siding, one canted onto its nose with both front wheels gone and the axle shattered. The rest of the traffic, wheeled, mounted, and two-footed, was forced to edge its way around through the narrow space left between the wreckage and the stone arch of the gate wall. A group of people were trying to pull the wagons apart and drag them through the gate out of the way. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to have agreed on which side of the gate they were moving them to, and so seemed to be largely nullifying each other’s efforts. As we wedged our own way through the gate, past a tangle of shouting men, including the wagon drivers, a group of city guards, and some frenzied partisans who had probably been normal citizens just passing through a short time before, I noticed a big crumbly gap in the overhead curve of the gate arch. Directly below it, I could now see more clearly, was the wagon with the crushed front axle, the top of a big stone sticking up above its sideboard.

I shouldn’t have given the situation a second thought. You built a gate, or a bridge or a palace, for that matter, and there was no getting around the fact that eventually it would start to fall down. Then you’d fix it up or just tear it down entirely and start over; that’s the way things went. All you hoped was that you didn’t happen to be standing under it when it started to let go. Sometimes you got real lucky and built something that was still defying gravity, in reasonable repair and with minimal maintenance, a thousand years later, but that sure wasn’t the way to bet.

Like I said, that much was only common wisdom. Maybe it wasn’t the case in the old days, I mean the really old days, but since that time civil engineering has become something of a lost art. Not by chance, and not because people lost interest in it, of course, but because the gods had decided we’d all be better off if we gave up technology and went back to a purer, grubbier world. Or at least the gods had decided they’d be better off. I’d always distrusted the gods because of their general high-handed attitude, and their aversion to the world’s use of technology was the perfect case in point. Now that I had my own private god out for a stroll, though, perhaps I could voice my objections in person, and maybe even find out from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, why they’d always acted this way, aside from naturally wanting to run the world and everybody’s activities in it. I glanced at the woman. Somewhat to my surprise, I found she was eyeing me, as though she was trying to decide whether to ask me something on the same order of interest to her as my own question was to me. We stared down each other for a second or two, then turned our heads to the front and resumed plowing on through the traffic jam.