Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

Max had done him the favor of making sure the stuff was right at hand. Iskendarian was adding another sheaf from the bookcase to the tall pile he’d assembled on the table when his eyes fell on a nearby blackboard. “What’s this?” he murmured. “Interesting, very interesting. A worthwhile extension. Perhaps -”

“Who is it?” said a woman’s voice from the top of the staircase at the side of the room. “Oh, it’s you. But what are you doing here?”’

I threw everything into it. I had to try to warn her - all it would take would be a peep, half-a-second’s control of our vocal cords, that wasn’t asking for much, but Iskendarian never flinched. I heard him mouth, “So much the better,” and raise his arm.

Roni was going into her strike mode, but she wasn’t a field operator, and even if she had been she wasn’t Iskendarian. Even penned up in the back of my brain and comatose for however long it had been, he still had the power of legions at his fingertips. A fireball blasted across the room and tore into the staircase and blew it apart. The wall behind it crashed out and the ceiling above fell in. The next story above started to follow it down in a rain of screeching wood, the tall barrels beneath the staircase burst their staves and gushed forth jets and waves of oily iridescent liquid, blast waves rolled past us - and I couldn’t see Roni. She’d vanished in the center of the ball of flame.

“Goddamn,” I thought. “He’s killed her.”

“Were you responsible for that disaster back there?” Zalzyn Shaa asked his brother as the coach continued jouncing along.

“One cannot bear all the world’s calamities on one’s own shoulder,” said his brother. “You of all people should know that.”

“I assume that means you don’t intend to answer the question.”

“He’s always been like this,” the Scapula told Leen in a calmly reasonable tone.

“Were you behind that massacre?” said Leen.

“I am behind, as you put it, quite a lot,” Arznaak acknowledged. “But I, a terrorist? Surely not - I am a force for order. Your friend Max, on the other hand, was clearly implicated -”

“You may have me chained up,” Shaa inserted, “you are most certainly up to something nefarious, but you don’t have to make me listen to this.”

“What about the Emperor?” Leen asked. “Did anyone see what happened to the Emperor?”

The Scapula gazed idly out the window. “Phlinn went after him, good old Phlinn. That is his kind of job, anyway.” He shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps Phlinn even rescued him, and survived himself in the bargain. Regardless, rest assured he behaved in a manner archetypally befitting an archetypal god of heroes. Ah, here we are, home at last.”

The carriage had indeed clattered to a halt. An attendant was opening the door, with behind him a serious contingent of guards. “Show our guests in,” the Scapula instructed. “Has anyone else arrived? Not yet? Well, he should be along momentarily.” With an energetic spring he bounded from his seat into the courtyard. As Leen and Shaa were being dragged, less comfortably, from the cab, Arznaak suddenly turned back. “You are awake,” he addressed his brother, “so you are certainly contemplating some bold move. Before you act so as to quixotically accelerate your own death you might consider a truth your friend Maximillian has always failed to appreciate.”

“And that truth is?” Shaa said.

“Why, that not every problem has a solution, of course.”

“Have you noticed that a gigantic iceberg is heading straight toward us?” Max remarked.

“You are reduced to this?” smirked Gadol V’Nora. “Such an old trick? No, Maximillian. You -”

Max shrugged as much as possible, given the number of hands still holding him.“Well, don’t say I didn’t try to warn you,” he said.

“If you -” Gadol began, but he broke off as something swooped toward them from the ruined section of the bridge, something round and shiny and trailing gouts of steam. Clanking madly, it made an erratic leap and gained perhaps five feet of altitude, then equally abruptly reversed course and dropped back toward the roadbed. Atop the reeling prodigy was sprawled a human form clutching frantically for purchase. Just when it seemed the thing would surely crash into their midst a fresh steam cloud enveloped it. When the cloud shredded, the contraption was bounding again into the sky.

“Read the formal indictment and let’s get him out of here,” said Chas, the magician, looking after the apparition with a clear expression of disbelief.

Gadol turned back from the retreating vapor trail and favored Chas with a brief frown. “Very well. In our power as Special Auxiliary to the Municipality of Peridol I arrest you in their name for -”

“What’s that?” one of the Hand’s troopers interrupted. “That big white -”

Every head in the group swiveled to follow the man’s pointing arm. Every head, that is, except one. Max threw himself back and around, ripping free of the restraining hands through the element of forceful surprise, put his head down, and charged the gap between two of the Hand. They spun away under the impact just far enough for Max to plunge on through. The low wall at the margin of the bridge was just beyond. Did he really want to do this, with his hands still frozen in a block of stone behind his back? Did he have a -

A titanic spine-rattling teeth-clenching screeching scraping sound came up from behind, and then with an equally loud crunch and THOMP! the bridge jerked out from under him. Max, still in forward flight, felt his footing vanish. He cartwheeled ahead, barely cleared the railing at the upside-down limit of his somersault, and went over the side. In the brief glimpse he caught behind him before beginning his drop toward the water below, Max saw several things of particular interest. The part of the iceberg he could see had fractured into a collection of boulder-sized ice fragments that were even now cascading onto the roadbed and careening across it, knocking people aside like tenpins. Overhead above the toppling ice cubes, caught in the midst of a prodigious leap from what a moment before had been the top of the iceberg, was a mightily thewed figure with another dangling person slung over his shoulder.

Max tumbled toward the water. Fortunately he had a second quantum level force burst pre-prepared for emergencies, and on voice trigger too. He began to subvocalize the release sequence -

Something slapped him across the back and knocked the wind out of him. No, not merely a slap, whatever-it-was was wrapping itself around his body. A hurling net - the edges weighted with bolo plumbs, the mesh slathered with some clinging adhesive, the -

Max hit the water. His mouth still open, he gulped fluid; his arms and legs securely swaddled and his hands still weighted down by Chas’ clay block, he began to sink. He could barely even writhe...

But something was hauling at his feet. One of the Running leviathans, some carnivore of the sea? No - a casting line was attached to the net. He was being drawn in. A gaff caught on the webbing behind his back, then another one near his ankles; they yanked together, and he came free of the water into the air.

Max coughed, retched, hacked -

“Oh, come now, Maximillian,” said a man standing over him. “Forget the show.”

Max spat up a final gout of water and opened his eyes. He was sprawled on a flatboat. Several men around him were nailing corners of the net to the deck. “You always were the smartest Hand,” Max stated, and coughed again.

Romm V’Nisa put his hands on his hips. “It was prudent to anticipate you would attempt to reach the water. I would have.”

“Thanks, teacher,” Max told him. Beyond the flatboat, what remained of the iceberg with its top lopped off had come to a stop partway under the bridge. The sliced-flat upper surface had wedged itself beneath the damaged section of the center span, where it now appeared to be serving as an effective, if temporary, splint.