Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

But that was far too abstract. As the men dragged her toward the end of the bridge, she could see Max back over her shoulder and hear the taunts of the leader of the band surrounding him. Even if Max got away, he’d been branded as the head of the terrorists - and with such an outrageous act to his credit as the one just accomplished he’d be ripped to shreds by the first crowd that caught sight of his face. And if he didn’t escape he’d clearly never leave custody alive.

But what did she have to do with it - and Shaa?

On the step up to the carriage she paused, straining against the hands shoving her inside for one last glance backward. Max was still beset by his captors. Off to the side, though, rising out of the river, was a glinting white wall. No, not a wall, a cliff - a moving cliff. What could that -

But then the hands thrust harder. Leen lost her balance and went sprawling after Shaa into the carriage. A set of outstretched legs kept her from falling completely to the floor, although she did manage to bang her head on the opposite windowsill.

“Ah,” said the owner of the legs, “at last you grace me with your personal attention.”

The owner was not Shaa. Leen twisted and looked up.

“Don’t worry about old Maximillian,” continued the Scapula. “He is in the best of hands. As are you, my dear, and of course my dear brother.”

It was trite and lame and stock, she knew that, but it was the only retort she could muster at the moment. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Why, it’s all very simple,” said the Scapula. “I’m about to get some good news, and I thought the two of you would like to help me celebrate.”

In for a penny, Karlini had figured, when Haddo had asked him for his backup against Dortonn, in for a pound. But he hadn’t counted on anything like this. Alone on the top of an iceberg in the middle of the Running of Squids; alone, that is, save for a pain-crazed powerhouse of a sorcerer who obviously didn’t care who else he took down with him. For all his flailing and trying to stay out of the way, Karlini had still had a leg ensnared by a looping tongue of ice. The stuff he’d been hurling at Dortonn had apparently not had full effect, either, unless Dortonn was being uncharacteristically active for someone whose heart had stopped. With the clinging fire still eating at his skin, too, and entombed as he was underneath the sweep of ice, kidney and liver failure might not be Dortonn’s primary worries at the moment, anyway.

If Karlini could get his leg free it might be just as well to cut his losses and leave the vicinity.

After all, the navigation channel wasn’t all that deep. If Dortonn’s iceberg kept growing, which it was clearly doing now under its own self-feeding chain reaction, it wouldn’t be long before it grounded itself. The grounding wouldn’t be the real problem. That would be the brisk flow-tide current pushing against it, the current and its tendency to tip the precarious iceberg over on its side. Abruptly the iceberg quivered violently, a high shrill grating shriek radiating through its mass and into the air. Karlini scrabbled for purchase and held on, feeling as though his bones were trying to pop their way out from under his skin.

Then, in an act of significant mercy, the scraping stopped. The iceberg, however, did not. It had cleared the momentary shoals. The fact that the iceberg had come that close to grounding in the middle of the channel, though, did not augur well for the future. Karlini decided to let Dortonn stew on his own and went to work on his leg. A few shaped-charge blasts should crack the ice sheet without losing him his foot...

A quick shadow passed over him, and in the corner of his eye, a glinting object. “Favored?” Karlini said.

The shiny object, a huffing brass sphere, banked around him and headed away, trailing a string of white steam-clouds in tight little balls. “I could use some help here, Favored,” called Karlini.

The ball kept going.

The plug in Karlini’s ear popped and hissed. “I just got a priority call from the bridge,” Favored’s voice crackled.

Bridge? What bridge? “Favored! -”

Then the noises from the plug stopped entirely. Favored had cut him off. The berg itself was busily creaking and groaning, of course, a cacophony Karlini’s present efforts against the ice were only serving to increase, but suddenly there was a new additional sound, closer to hand and more regular; an added noise of cracking and chipping. It was –

A hand appeared over the spire of ice encasing the stern, then another matching hand next to it, bearing a dagger. The dagger plunged into the ice with the same regular sound - which was, of course, the sound of someone cutting their way up a sheer wall of ice. The associated head rose into view between the hands. “I should know by now that this kind of thing is always happening around you people,” said Svin.

“Uh, Svin?” Karlini called. “Would you give me a hand here?”

Svin, who had been looking down through the ice at Dortonn, glanced up at Karlini. His eyes widened. Karlini squinted back at him, then twisted to look back over his shoulder. His own eyes went big, and his jaw dropped for good measure.

Looming ahead of them was obviously Favored’s bridge. The center section, shrouded in flames and oily black smoke, was just slightly below the level of Karlini’s present perch. As he gaped at it, a section of wreckage tore free and went tumbling away toward the surface of the water.

Actually, come to think of it, Karlini thought he probably didn’t need Svin’s help after all. He kicked violently, and the ice encasing his leg, chipped and abraded down already by his careful employment of pulse-bursts, flew off in shards. His leg came free. The released force sent him rolling back on his side, temporarily without a good handhold, and as he skidded backward on the slick ice sheet covering the contorted roof of the houseboat, the iceberg began to shudder again beneath him, even more vigorously than the last time. The peak whiplashed forward. “Aah!-” Karlini began to yell.

Svin was too far away, though, and Karlini already had too much momentum. He felt the cold of the ice leave his back and felt the rush of air in his face, his stomach began to drop out from under him, and as he continued to twist in the air he caught a glimpse of the surface of the water far too far below, a group of dots that might be sea lions scattering in confusion as the iceberg bore down upon them.

What he needed to do was concentrate on spellcraft. His mind, though, was perversely fixating on the last time he had found himself in mid-air over a substantial body of water. The reflection was not encouraging. There was no giant bird around this time to puck him from the air.

Svin, used to working around ice from his youth in terrain whose primary characteristic was frost, hung on to his embedded dagger with one hand and found purchase for the other in a crevasse. The large tremor died. The iceberg lurched forward again. Beneath him and ahead, though, the ice was caving in. Svin eased himself back and turned his head aside. With his face averted, the storm of jagged icicles that suddenly erupted as the depression in the ice stopped collapsing and instead blew out did no more than slice the skin away from his neck and puncture his ear, rather than putting out an eye. The dagger began to shift and his other hand was now clutching nothing but a detached and crumbling ice cube, and even though the pulverized ice in the air had produced a sudden whiteout Svin knew what lay at the bottom of the fresh ice crater anyway, so he flung himself forward into the hole, turned in the air, and did his best to aim.

Tildy Mont had seen her share of preposterous and overblown situations since encountering the Karlinis and their associates for the first time, but the present sequence clearly set some new sort of record. Not that she’d found anyone she knew. She’d just kept making her way through the crowd, and then the proclamations had started and the trumpets and cheers, and so she’d settled for just watching the aquatic procession from the place she’d squeezed herself into on the bridge.