Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

“Of course,” said Jurtan, who indeed suddenly felt as though he did have some greater idea of something that was going on. He fished around in his pack and came up with the Iskendarian page Max had let him take. “We wanted to know what you could make of this document.”

The religionist perused it with pursed lip. “Tarfon should see this,” he allowed after a moment. “His section of the lamentation will be finished momentarily.”

The high-pitched guy currently wailing up on the stage? Oh, great. “Uh, excuse me, but do you do this stuff all the time?”

The man rocked back and forth a few times in apparent consideration. “This is a day of commemoration, a fast day, a day of meditation on the state of the world. This is the day when we remember the calamities of the past, ours and the world’s, when we learn from what we have lost what our task is for today. We acknowledge that God, for our sins, has cast us out of our land, our age, our -”

“God?”

“We worship the One God,” the man confirmed.

“The One God? Which one? Gashanatantra, Slugan Kaporis -”

“The Ineffable One, the One who can neither be seen or heard, the -”

“What good is that? Isn’t the whole reason you want to tie yourself to a god because of the stuff they can do for you?”

The man made an expression that was more smile than rictus, but shared an appreciable amount of both. “That is indeed the current sentiment. We are certainly behind the times, but what can we do? We believe what we believe. Some consider it a curse to bear witness to the truth. We think it is a blessing, but I will grant you it is often a fairly problematic one. Our history is not pleasant.”

And there was a whole temple full of people as crazy as this guy was? Or half full, anyway? “Why don’t the gods you don’t believe in wipe you out, then? They don’t like to be ignored, not to mention disbelieved.”

“The world is full of cranks who remain beneath notice,” the man said with a thoroughly straight face. “But, no, I didn’t say we don’t believe in them; that would be denying empirical reality. We just don’t think they’re gods. Ah, here’s Tarfon.”

As the new person, his chanting complete, came stalking up the aisle, it occurred to Jurtan that this was in fact just the kind of loony organization the Shaas might be likely to hang around with. They were, after all, more than a little loopy themselves. Was Eden just a supporter or an out-and-out believer? Zalzyn Shaa’s attitude of sardonic disdain also might owe more than a chance amount to this sort of variant ideology. There were obviously more people running around off the beaten track than he’d suspected.

Even if they were crazy, that didn’t mean they might not know something. Maybe this Tarfon guy ... or rather, this Tarfon woman. Or girl? The contralto had thrown him off, and he clearly hadn’t been paying enough attention anyway. “Mirror writing,” Tarfon said immediately on being handed the document. “Distorted script, too.” She perused it for a few moments in silence. “The letters belong to another language than the one in which the sheet is written. The writer is using the letters to make a phonetic transcript.”

“So you can’t read it?” Jurtan said.

She glanced briefly up at him. “Certainly I can read it. I know the script system from a few book fragments in my father’s library, and I can piece together the meaning in the other language as I go along. Both of the languages are pre-Dislocation, but this page here is a good few hundred years post.”

“How can you tell?”

“Look here.” Tarfon indicated a section of text at the top of the page. Max had given him one of the pages that contained only line after line of unbroken writing, without any of the drawings or equations featured in some of the other material. “It’s context. The writer refers to the God of Curses, and then here’s a mention of something called the Steadfast Spell. The modern gods appeared with the Dislocation, and magic too of course, so that immediately tells us this had to be written after that time. Then here’s an aside about Abysinnia the Moot.” Tarfon stared at the passage, then suddenly blushed. “Um, it looks like old gossip, actually. I can’t make it all out.”

“What about your father?” Jurtan said. “You learned from him? Maybe he could help more.”

“I learned from his library,” Tarfon told him evenly. “That’s all he left me. He died when I was a child.”

“Sorry,” Jurtan muttered. Maybe he should work more on learning when to keep his mouth shut, or at least on practicing a better way to phrase things.

“You couldn’t have known,” said Tarfon, “and it’s not recent news, either. Aki, why couldn’t you read this? I know you know -”

The first man stroked his beard and merely raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, another one of your practical lessons, right?” Tarfon put on an expression of deliberate bemusement. “One of these days...”

“Eventually Tarfon will take my place,” Aki said to Jurtan.

Tarfon was ignoring him, or perhaps she was only engrossed back in the document. “This isn’t the only page,” she stated.

“No,” Jurtan said. “That’s right.” His authorization from Max had extended far enough to admit that. “There’s enough stuff to fill a sack.”

“I’m not surprised. The writer seems to be writing notes to himself. Or herself, that’s not clear. More than notes, really - more of a complete personal history. Look, here the writer refers back to a incident he’s apparently already discussed, and here he talks about Formula 138.”

“You mean this is a book of memoirs?”

“I don’t know,” said Tarfon. “I’m not sure. Perhaps I just don’t have enough of a command of the language. It sounds less like storytelling, though, and more like ... how would you describe it?”

“Lessons,” said Aki. “Instructions. Very curious; it does seem to use a didactic style. Would you like us to review the rest of this material?”

“Yeah,” Jurtan said. “We sure would, except you’ve got to come to where it is.”

“A reasonable precaution, the streets being what they are,” allowed Aki.

Jurtan gave the address, and they set an appointment for a date after the congestion from the Running would presumably have let up. Jurtan didn’t forget to thank them both; he thought he even managed to do that without punching himself in the mouth again with his foot. As he was exiting back onto the road outside, though, thinking how nice it was to get away from that weird sect and out from under their mournful chanting, no matter how helpful they might or might not have been, he realized that he had not actually escaped after all. His mind was still playing that damn chant at him.

“Stop it,” he muttered. “What’s gotten into you?” That’s all he needed, a built-in torture squad. The music wasn’t giving him any particular message, either; it was just loping along while driving him up the wall.

He broke free of the warehouse row onto a major street. To the right toward the Tongue Water, the boulevard fed into one of the big bridges. As it crossed the center of the channel it sprouted a second level, an observation deck, now a focus of the attention of a crew of workers hanging bunting and scrubbing down surfaces, and another crew of toughs mounting guard. The last thing Jurtan wanted at the moment was to fight the throng to look at a grandstand, though, so he turned his back on the scene and began to fight his way in the other direction. Next to him, the middle of the boulevard was still being kept clear for a single lane of vehicle and mounted traffic in each direction. He had been considering hitching a ride when it occurred to him that his internal music had indeed finally changed.