Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

“All I can say is he’s sure been a pretty effective secret.” Jurtan Mont was purely a side issue, but Max was perfectly happy to be discussing him, rather than have Shaa focus again on something more central, such as where they were going and what they were going to do there. You couldn’t ask for a better cover story than the Running of the Squids, of course, but Shaa had an uncanny talent for sniffing out the presence of one of Max’s stratagems. Especially when it might directly involve Shaa himself.

Fortunately Shaa was off his game. “Actually, I was giving serious consideration to taking to my bed,” Shaa had said grumpily when Max had arrived to roust him out, asking heartily what he had planned for the day.

“Nonsense!” Max had told him. “And miss the Running of the Squids? Now that you’re back in Peridol and all? That’s not the Shaa I know.”

“You said it,” groused Shaa, “I didn’t. Do you know your tone of voice is far too light for credibility?”

In the event Max had won out, and so here they were; the two of them and what appeared to be the entire population of Peridol, if not the western world.

“It is a pleasant day for it,” Shaa allowed. “If one likes sunshine, that is. I’m not going to have to watch you compete, am I?”

“Why would I want to do something like that? What’s to gain? I seem to have all the notoriety I need at the moment.”

“Too many of our activities lately have seemed to culminate with someone ending up in a body of water,” said Shaa. “I was only asking.”

“I’m staying on dry land,” Max stated. “That other Running was quite enough to last me a longer time than this.”

Up ahead now as they bashed and elbowed their way along was the main Tongue Water bridge decked out with its event marshal’s reviewing stand. “Did your plans extend so far as to involve a vantage point with a field of view?” inquired Shaa.

“You mean watching the spectators isn’t enough for you?” Indeed, the spectators were a show-and-a-half all by themselves. Fish and other sea creatures were the order of the day, but they were only an aid to inspiration rather than any sort of restraint. There were the food-vendors, of course, slinging fish fried, sauteed, pickled, and raw along their portable service counters or through the air at their customers; there were fish balls, fish broths, fish sculptures; catfish, pike, perch, trout, flounder, bass, salmon, halibut, mackerel, cod, carp, eel, swordfish, tuna, pompano, sardine, haddock - and those were only a selection of the sea creatures with scales and fins. Mounds of shells awaiting preparation or already consumed lined the gutters and crunched underfoot, and off to the side a gang of urchins were playing pitch-and-catch with what appeared to be the remains of an entire bed of clams. Next to the game, a juggling troupe wearing on their chests the emblem of a startled grouper, complete with animated pop-eyes, were tossing and twirling small octopuses, or at least their stuffed effigies. Tentacles whirled in the air, entwining in artful pinwheels and whirlpools of color. Overhead flew long stylized banners, taking in the air through gaping mouths and gill slits and puffing out their red and bright orange bodies.

And then there was the crowd itself, or at least the minor part without a particular scheme or profit-making goal. Plainly not everyone was costumed, but the riot of odd sights parading past made the more typical majority fade into obscurity like sun-bleached wallpaper. Headdresses were the most common, some purchased from the tall waving stacks artfully balanced by the omnipresent hat-hucksters, with the result that waving eyestalks and drooping flagellae and gape-lipped mackerel assaulted the eye in every direction. Here though too was a proudly promenading school of two-footed herring, and trailing behind them two crisscrossing sharks, their dorsal fins cruising above the head-level of the throng. At the bridge-rail -

A vast shout had broken out on the bridge, and was even now rippling across the crowd as spectators turned and craned and gaped. Atop the reviewing stand, a human figure, radiating a golden glow even in the sunlight, had stepped up on a platform and was waving at the multitude. “What, Maximillian,” said Shaa, “not even the barest yelp from you of communal approval? No acknowledgement of the presence of a great one in our midst?”

“It’ll take a lot more than a personal appearance by Phlinn Arol to make me stand up and holler,” Max said. Phlinn’s advent did mean that they might be drawing close to getting officially underway, though. It was time to start looking out for the one Max was there to meet. He’d been on guard all morning, of course; even more so than usually. Once he’d taken the thing from the lab into his possession again late the previous night extreme prudence had been indicated. It had taken until almost morning to make the other preparations after Leen had messengered over the scanty results of her research the night before, but who needed sleep at a time like this? He’d napped before the stuff from Leen had arrived, anyway.

The god was probably already around. He’d have to reveal himself eventually, hopefully in the manner they’d agreed upon in their exchange of messages yesterday evening. Still, some sort of preemptive strike couldn’t be entirely ruled out. The amulet gave Max the benefit of anonymity, although the thing in his pocket might have something to say about that too. When it came right down to it, there was no substitute for old-fashioned vigilance.

“As long as we’re here,” said Shaa, “I would just as soon have something worthwhile to look at.”

“Right,” Max said. “Sure. Let’s go over here.”

How had he talked her into this? Perhaps this was what being swept off your feet really involved. If so, Leen could certainly understand why it had never held any appeal for her. The question was why she was letting herself be sucked into it now.

It defied belief. After Max had (after all) put her in significant danger as part of his own nefarious plot, after she had found herself wanting to cosh him over his head and write him out of her life, whatever she might have thought she could be growing to feel about him, she had simultaneously and to her great surprise listened when he proposed a favor she could do for him, and then to her total astonishment discovered she was entertaining the notion of doing what he’d asked. True, he had all but stated that he was putting himself on the line and changing the habits of a lifetime in trusting someone he barely knew, and he had apparently put himself back into hazard to extricate her from a nasty situation of his own devising there in the Archives. But it was increasingly clear that “apparently” and “from the looks of things” were not only appropriate modifiers to apply to Max’s activities, they were (if anything) far too weak. Max clearly couldn’t do something simply if he could rather, with a little thought, complicate it beyond understanding. So who knew what he was really up to? For that matter, who knew who he really was, and not as a matter of surface identity, either? It was questionable if he even knew himself.

Only the problem plainly wasn’t Max. It was her. She’d held the power to squash him, probably. Certainly she still had the choice to walk away. She kept telling herself she was explicitly undecided about what to do about him, right? So what was she doing here?

Maybe he reminded her of her brother, but without the sticky issues of consanguinity.

Still, it was developing to be a nice day, if you liked this sort of thing, and if you liked mobs, of course. Leen was finding she didn’t mind the excuse to be out for the Running. It might be overwrought and it might be garish, and the whole idea was without a doubt more than vaguely ridiculous, but there was certainly nothing else like it. It wouldn’t be anything like the time she’d gone with her grandfather, the famous year that a full score of celebrants had run the oars of a galley in center channel while being flanked by a pod of killer whales. The whales had been preoccupied with keeping an eye on the pair of cuttlefish ahead of them, jockeying for position for the moment when the restraints came off at the exit of the Tongue, so several of the people who’d missed their footing or had gotten smacked by oars and had fallen in had actually survived unscathed, and most of the others had made it through with the loss of only minor parts of their anatomy to the whales’ distracted snacking.