Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

“I should blast you now,” said Jardin, shoving the ring in his pocket.

“I could have let loose against you too,” Max reminded him, “which was the whole reason for doing this thing under the feet of the Emperor and all your sightseeing god-pals in the first place. I -”

But Jardin was already striding away. Just as well. This wasn’t the time for gabbing, it was time to get back to Shaa and have it out. Max darted out from behind the pylon and began making his way back along the bridge.

There was no warning, only a flicker of light over his shoulder and a quick fluorescence in his detection field. Then a massive WHOOM! burst out from behind, and a gust of flaming hellfire slammed into him and lifted him off his feet and sent him hurtling in a long dive toward the rippling surface of the bridge.

Haddo withdrew his hand from the cloak and extended the small plain ring to Dortonn. Dortonn snatched it away and clenched his fist over it. He allowed himself a quick supercilious smirk. “Once a loyal flunky, always the same, is it not so, O my Fist?”

“As say you must it be, Great Dortonn.”

“We must speak again,” Dortonn said. He took a single step back and vanished.

Vanished? - no, Haddo realized, as a trapdoor in the floor slammed shut behind Dortonn’s falling head. Just as well, since the ice encasing Haddo’s own feet still had him locked solidly to the floorboards, even though the boots Favored had whipped up with the internal heating coils were now radiating for all they were worth. And Haddo had reached the end of his mental count of ten.

The dark room suddenly lit. Slices of glaring white lashed up from the gaps in the floorboards and sprayed up through the dusty air and laid a fiery grid across the ceiling. The expected shriek of pain from below was simultaneous. Haddo had never doubted Favored, not really, but it was always remarkable when one of his tricky devices did its act. With Karlini’s magical camouflage radiating the signature of the entrapped Pod Dall, the false ring had obviously felt right to Dortonn. It wouldn’t have held up to serious probing for long but it hadn’t had to; it had been long enough. Favored’s quick fuse had now run to its end and ignited the white phosphorus band itself, and the capsule of clinging fire.

Dortonn was wailing from below as the light source began to whip back and forth. Haddo yanked again and this time one foot came free, then the other. The sound of Dortonn was suddenly joined by the sound of splintering wood from behind Haddo at the front the building. The front door exploded inward, and then standing next to Haddo was Svin. But now Haddo could hear churning water, too - too much water for a single swimmer. He waved his hand at the floor. The noise from below was swamped by the quick grind of an invisible saw against wood, and the trapdoor and a chunk of floorboards an arm’s-span across converted themselves into shavings.

Through the new hole under the building were tarred pilings and lapping water and a murky bank of mud - obviously an old pier. In the center between the pilings, a twenty- or thirty-foot drop down, Haddo could see in the phosphorus glow a stretch of frothing water, but no Dortonn. The glow was coming from just out of sight, and it was receding. Haddo poked his head down and craned his neck. A boat - a small houseboat - was just moving out of the hiding place and breaking through a concealing mat of woven netting into the sunlit Tongue Water channel beyond. A bubbling wake led to the houseboat’s stern. “To the waterfront,” said Haddo. “Head him off we must.”

But Svin was already gone. Or at least going - a serious leap took him over the crater in the floor, a huge sword-swing bashed out the wall into the next room, and then there was nothing to see but a new cloud of swirling dust. Haddo wheeled and made for the street through the first gap Svin had left in the front wall and door.

Karlini swung another elbow and the seagull batted its wings, and the people in front of him reluctantly parted again. One more row of spectators and he’d be at the edge of the wharf. As nearly as he could determine, he’d gone straight from the rendezvous location toward the Tongue Water. The sides of the channel below were lined with decorated barges and other small craft, but these were obviously not what he was looking for. Where was -

A muttering had started behind him. The festively dressed spectators were hugging themselves and stamping suddenly against the boards and looking up at the clear sky. And then Karlini felt it too - the wave of cold, a chill harsh enough that it felt like an abrupt dip in a vat of ice. Not from the heavens, though.

From underfoot.

Karlini pushed aside the final woman ahead, took a quick glance to verify his suspicion, and then, even more quickly, before his better judgment had a chance to kick in, vaulted over the low railing. The seagull cast an incredulous glance at Karlini, seeming to question whether he’d taken leave of his species identity, and flapped convulsively off his shoulder and away from him into the air. Below Karlini for a second was open slack water, and next to the open area a barge in the shape of a trumpeter swan occupied by a group of spectators in the process of falling over as their vessel was shoved rudely away. The space was immediately filled by the vessel that had done the shoving; undoubtedly the houseboat Haddo was shouting about in his ear, appearing from beneath the pier with the remains of a mudbank draped over its prow and dank mist freezing to its superstructure. As he landed atop the cabin, Karlini noted behind him in the stern gallery a howling human figure writhing in a pool of piercing white and orange flame.

Unexpectedly the boat lifted under the force of the bow wake from whatever creature was passing down the Tongue. The stern quarter of the boat bashed against a piling, scraped with hair-raising intent, and caught up. The lee side of the breaker poured over the gunwales, mounting quickly almost to the top of the cabin. Karlini felt a swirl of trigger-releases from the figure in the stern. A matrix locked into place, and with a blast of arctic wind the water atop the ship froze solid.

The boat staggered under the weight of the ice. Dortonn, now trapped in a bubble inside the ice himself, was continuing to struggle with the fire that enveloped him, although from the cloud of steam that was hiding him from view the ice might be helping him out. Even if Dortonn was merely lashing back out of reflex or was being assisted by previously programmed automatic safeguards, the tactical situation might very well be shifting in his favor. Karlini disliked causing death or severe personal injury through direct magical action but perhaps this was a case that warranted it. Shaa had taught him how to inflict acute cirrhosis, and sudden heart failure was always a classic. Karlini braced himself on the canted roof and reeled off the proximate parameters. Except - why did his stomach seem to be sinking?

Karlini looked off to the side and immediately grabbed for the nearest handhold. The wharf with its gape-mouthed crowd was retreating, that much wasn’t surprising ... but it was retreating down as much as away! The boat rocked again, more violently, and traversed an arc that must have been fifteen feet wide. Karlini had a quick view, straight down, of the foaming water and the sparkling wall rising up out of it.

The houseboat was embedded in the top of a growing iceberg.

Shaa and Leen were both looking straight toward the blast. In the quick moment before Shaa’s outsweeping arm carried them both down to hug the pavement, they could see the closest pillars supporting the observation deck disappear in red fireballs and clouds of black smoke, and an expanding hailstorm of hurtling stone and fragmented steel. The bridge was shuddering beneath them - but was it starting to lean? Would the entire structure go down?