Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

As creative as I’d been at getting myself into trouble, I might find out.

I looked out at the haze and stroked. Maybe one reason the fog was so thick was that some of the murk that had been clouding my own mind was finally leaking out. Wishful thinking, maybe, but you could argue that was the same philosophy that had already carried me alive and intact over more than a few rapids in the last several weeks. Wishful thinking and luck.

Riding the rapids does take a toll, though. The end of the mess in Oolsmouth had left me in a daze; how much so was only becoming clear to me now that I was coming out of it. In my stupor, flowing along with the current, I’d taken some actions that didn’t seem entirely well-chosen now in retrospect. Drifting out to the Oolsmouth docks and linking up with Shaa and the Karlinis for the ride to Peridol was one of them.

It had seemed to make sense at the time. I’d felt like I needed reinforcements around, enough to provide me with a breather to rethink and regroup. I also hadn’t been looking forward to walking or hanging onto a horse all the way from Oolsmouth to Peridol. On the other hand, for anybody who might be watching me, I’d now reinforced my connection with the others and in effect dragged them even deeper into my own problems. I know, I know, “anybody who might be watching me” sounds paranoid to the extreme. Paranoid I may have been, but there was still the evidence of recent twists and turns to show that in the case paranoia was the most conservative of strategies; I was as sure of that as, well, as my own name. Of course, considering that I didn’t have the slightest idea of what my name actually was, that gives a pretty good outline of the state of affairs.

They’d been calling me the Creeping Sword. An alias like that is enough to send anyone with a modicum of taste back to bed with an icebag, I know, but unfortunately it was really my own fault. There’d been that case I’d just finished involving this Sword guy, see, and the name was so cheesy it stuck in the front of my mind. When I fell in with Max and Shaa and they wanted some handle to address me by it was the first thing I could think of. Like most first thoughts, it left endless possibilities for recrimination after the fact. It beat “hey you over there in the corner,” I guess, but both of them had about the same relationship to anything approaching the real me. At least, I hoped they did. None of us really knew, which was yet another way of popping the situation into a nutshell. Of course, a patronymic like the Creeping Sword was certainly the least of my worries.

Just because I had problems, though, didn’t mean they were all equally difficult to address. Even if joining the Not Unreasonable Profit had been a bad idea it still might not have been too late to escape the repercussions, which is why I found myself out alone in a rowboat in the middle of the night in the middle of the ocean. From my vantage point at the moment, this was not the first time one of my solutions looked less appealing than the problem it was supposed to solve. Nevertheless, if I could make it to shore it shouldn’t be more than a three- or four-day walk into Peridol along the coast road. That sounded like a good investment. A stout hike was probably the perfect prescription for draining the last dregs of goo from my mind. That’s what Shaa had said, anyway, and prescriptions were his business.

There wasn’t much question about the hike’s destination, either; Peridol was clearly the place to be heading. Whatever your question might be, Peridol was always the leading place to find answers. Of course, Peridol being what it was there were usually more answers than questions, and if you hadn’t thought to bring a question with you, Peridol was more than happy to provide you with more than enough of its own. That was Peridol during normal times. During the Knitting season, that should apply at least double; maybe even triple, who knew? Since Peridol was Peridol, someone probably had the multiplier posted somewhere, with a back room full of probabilists arguing over the odds.

There it was again, math. Things kept coming back to math. For me, math had always been a dark room and me without a match. I didn’t think I had any better grasp of mathematics now than I’d had before I’d run afoul of Max and his crew. Well, fine, I’d never wanted to be an accountant, and I’d certainly never wanted anything to do with the other major discipline that required a solid grasp of math, both abstract and applied. It was an axiom that you couldn’t do magic unless you could work the math, but that had always been just dandy with me.

Just look at me now, though. Whether I’d had anything deliberate to do with it or not, at the very least you had to admit a lot of magic had been working itself around me lately; not only around me but through me. “Through me” just about describes it, too. I wasn’t real happy about it; I didn’t like being the next thing to a conduit or a trade road, sitting there minding my own business while magic stampeded over my head like a herd of runaway buffalo, but then I wasn’t real fond of magic in any guise. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely complaining either - there had been a couple of situations where I’d have been in a terminally tight spot if I hadn’t succeeded in sucking something useful out of Gashanatantra through our metabolic link. At least that’s what I’d assumed was happening. Now I wasn’t so sure.

There was a lot I wasn’t sure about, and even more about which I absolutely knew I understood too little. Even something as simple as the cast of players, whether they were there by deliberate intention or had just been swept up by the swelling broom of events, was far from clear. There was Gashanatantra, who had had an important hand in getting this thing started in the first place. He’d hauled me in to be his front man back in Roosing Oolvaya, using the hook and gaff rig that bound his metabolism to mine. One of the worst things to do if you want to live to an advanced age is to surprise a god, but I’d surprised him, all right, when it turned out the metabolic link was more than a one-way street. Drawing fragments of his knowledge as well as his power through the link had helped me out in the short term, had helped me enough to save my life more than once. Whether the long-term situation was any more than the same fated death stretched out for the sake of excruciation remained to be seen. What didn’t seem open to question was the extent to which the events just past had focussed Gash’s attention on me. At best I was a tool he’d found unexpectedly useful; at worst I might have actually become a center of his serious interest.

As Shaa and Max had told me and I’d come to see for myself in Oolsmouth, Gash’s reputation for plots with more layers than a ripe onion was honestly earned. The mess in Roosing Oolvaya had been downright intimate by comparison. There, Gash had only sent me up against Oskin Yahlei, the necromancer and would-be god who’d taken charge of the ring holding the trapped Death, Pod Dall. The ring had swept Karlini into the situation, too, and with him Max, but if Gash cared about them or even knew they were there I hadn’t seen a sign. Of course, it now appeared that, whatever he had said at the time, Gash’s main interest then had been with the ring; after all, he’d been the one who’d trapped Pod Dall in it in the first place.

Throughout the Roosing Oolvaya and Oolsmouth side of things, though, Gash hadn’t seemed to necessarily want the ring in his own possession. Instead, it was lurking out there serving the same purpose as a fishing lure or a piece of flypaper or a nice ripe tarpit - to work as a catalyst and a decoy, both, pulling folks out of the woodwork and getting them enmeshed in a situation that appeared to be one thing on its face, but that in fact involved Gash behind the scenes pulling strings toward his own inscrutable goals. Every time I thought about it his hand only looked more subtle. He wasn’t one for brute force; instead, the core of his style as I’d seen it rested in giving players the opportunity to do things their inclination naturally disposed them toward anyway. Once the framework was in place, all Gash had to do was point them toward the right target and stand back while they took off after it like a hound after a plumped-up rabbit.