Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

Another? thought Leen. “Who was this other mythical god?”

Max stood back and considered the wall. “Now that I think about it, that story might be making more and more sense after all. This is Dislocation stuff, you realize that.”

“Of course.”

“And according to the stories, Byron was the one who caused the Dislocation and the birth of the gods in the first place.”

It was just as well she was sitting down. “Byron?”

“You haven’t heard of him? Byron the Artificer?”

“What do you know about him?”

Max shrugged. “How much does anyone know? He was the father of the gods in some allegorical way, created the magic that overthrew technology, turned against his creations and was swallowed up by them. How mythical can you get? No real person could be that much of an archetype. Likely there was a real Byron and he just had a lot of creation legends hung on him, who knows? But this thing’s no legend, sure enough.” Then Max started spouting gibberish.

Leen jerked upright. Was there a curse after all, and had it just stricken Max? But suddenly, as abruptly as he’d begun Max had fallen silent. “Are you all right? What was that?”

“I’m trying to remember what extinct language Byron might have used,” Max said, his hands on his hips and a glare on his face toward the wall. “Drooze ya?” he demanded of the wall. “No, huh?”

“You actually speak pre-Dislocation languages?”

“What good is grubbing around in the past if you can’t understand what you find? My accent’s probably wrong, though. The only folks around who really know the right pronunciation are the gods, and of course they’re not talking.” He said something else bizarre to the wall.

“You don’t think something might really be listening to you, do you?” But she was the one who’d first thought that something was alive back there, so why not?

“It’s worth a - what’s this?”

A small green disc of light had appeared at the upper left corner of the dark glass slab and somewhere in its interior. It was slowly blinking - on, off, on, off.

“What did you say to it?” Leen asked, with no little amazement.

“‘Hello,’ I think. Good morning, something like that. Let’s try this.” Max spoke another phrase, a longer one this time, from the sound of it in the same language.

The green dot hesitated, stopped blinking, disappeared; then suddenly it had leapt back to life and was racing across the panel, leaving letters glowing in its wake. That was the only thing they could be, letters. Only what did they -

“The hell you say,” Max sputtered, squinting at the display. “Goddamned oracle.”

“What?” said Leen.

Max scowled at the green scrawl. “The worthless thing’s being cryptic. I asked it what it had to tell us but it’s gone into some kind of riddle mode. Either that or it just likes non sequiturs. ‘If it’s advanced enough you can’t tell technology from magic,’ what am I supposed to say to that?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah,” said Max. “I - oh, great. Now it’s gone away.”

The letters had vanished again, leaving the blinking green dot. “That’s it? That’s all?”

But apparently it was. Though Max cajoled it for the next fifteen minutes, the thing now totally ignored him; whatever riddle-answer it had been expecting it had obviously failed to receive. Max cast an eye back at Leen. He would have to trust her to do his research for him. He certainly hadn’t accomplished his mission in the Archives and it was already getting to be time to go. He had his appointment with his contact from the Inauguration Ball, to get the god’s answer to the proposal Max had made. It was a tricky enough gambit, already, without running the risk of being late as well. But if the god did accept the deal, that’s when Max would need the insight the research should provide, and he’d need it pretty damn fast. “Let me explain some more about what I’m trying to do,” Max began.

One certainly had to give credit where credit was due. Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable, in the course of his career, had managed to run afoul of quite an impressive list of talents. It was really quite neighborly of him, Fradjikan thought. It had made it so convenient to recruit forces for his own plan. Not every major job gave one the luxury to pick and choose.

Not that any of those he’d recruited were up to his own level, of course. There was the Scapula, whose precise level remained to be determined but was certainly high. Fradi hadn’t exactly recruited the Scapula himself, however; there had been some amount of solicitation on each side. That clearly had planted the roots of the current situation, with its questions and uncertainties. Which was not to say that the Scapula’s additions and modifications to the plan weren’t well-chosen, and rather clever too, in the sneakily underhanded manner that gave the best plans their revelatory character. Still, the Scapula’s motivations and ultimate goals remained cryptic. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with that, either, since Fradjikan obviously was facilitator and not target, but it was always better to be on the safe side. Safety, as always, rested with greater knowledge. He would just have to keep his eyes -

“Is that it?”

Fradjikan recollected himself smoothly from his brief reverie. Standing across from him next to the refreshments he’d set out in the dayroom were the three other participants in this final preparatory meeting. “That is the plan,” Fradi restated.

“You’re sure he’ll be in the right place?”

“He will be there,” Fradi assured them. “There will undoubtedly be some last-minute improvising required, but that is what distinguishes professionals such as yourselves from the rabble, does it not?”

The man stroked his curled black beard with the hand that was not holding a goblet, then ran it through the rakishly wild hair over his forehead. “Max can be a pretty slippery guy,” he remarked. “It’s never been an easy matter keeping him in sight. He’s always changing himself around and climbing up on roofs and letting off decoys, who knows what-all.”

“It’s about time somebody turned that against him, too,” said the robed fellow at his side. His own head was shaved clean, except for a residual fringe that ran in a circle above his ears. “You’ve done a solid job, I’ll give you that. Using Kalifa and Ma Pitom to keep the pressure on - and us, too - I bet Max doesn’t know if he’s coming or going.”

“Never hinge an operation on a bet,” the third man said darkly, glowering at the titles on the bookcase.

The first one eyed him with an expression of some surprise. “You’re awful talkative today, Romm. You got a problem?”

Romm V’Nisa turned to face them, his arms folded across his chest. “Maximillian is always a problem,” he intoned. Then he added, “Problems are my job.”

“If there weren’t problems to solve we’d all be out of a job,” said the man in the robe. “Max has always been so suspicious it’s been hard to pull anything on him; show him a picture of a bed and he’ll think somebody with a dagger’s gonna jump out from under it at him. The idea of playing to his suspicions by burying him up to his eyebrows in plots was a master stroke. All these traps, menaces, ambushes falling on him from every which-way, and then the subversion of the irredentists, and linking Max to them with that scandal-poster campaign, well, it’s -”

Romm grunted. “Were you raised by magpies? If you compromise operational security with your chatter I will finally cut out your tongue.”

Their leader sighed. “Is there some particular detail you still want to discuss, Romm? I’m satisfied that Senor Ballista’s plan is as solid as we can ask for.”