Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Catastrophe

Shaa straightened. His face lit. “Ah!” he said. He bounced to his feet, ran through the door and into the street, elbowed aside an enticingly dressed young woman and the heavily whiskered riverboat man who had his hand on her hip, and reached the boy at the mouth of the alley. The boy had started to sag limply to the ground. Shaa pinched him on the bridge of the nose, quite hard. The boy failed to react; his eyes neither moved nor blinked. “Ah,” Shaa said again. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulders, lifted him partly off the ground, and started toward the Bilious Gnome. A hand reached in from the side and closed on the front of Shaa’s cloak. “Not so fast, huh,” said the whiskered sailor, his voice muffled by the underbrush covering his face. “What d’yer think yer doing, shoving me around, me and my, friend, here?”

“My apologies,” Shaa said. “My friend is not well.”

The sailor looked suspiciously at them. “Not the plague, i’n it?”

“There are many plagues,” Shaa said. “Who can say?”

The sailor looked at the young woman, then straightened himself and stuck out his chin. “Plague or no plague, what I go to do, I should take yer face and -”

Shaa looked at the young woman himself and raised his eyebrow suggestively. She obligingly canted one hip and nudged the sailor. The sailor followed Shaa’s look, the young woman batted her eyelashes, and the sailor’s grip loosened and fell away. Shaa quickly reentered the Bilious Gnome, dragging his floppy companion. The thump-twang of the paddle trio faded as Shaa kicked the door closed. Shaa dropped his burden on a bench, resting the boy’s head on the table, and resumed his own seat across the table from him.

The boy stirred, his head twitched, and then he pulled himself up and looked around, blinking his eyes.

“My name is Shaa,” said Shaa. “I am a physician.”

The boy’s gaze focused on Shaa and turned wary. Shaa, with some charity, estimated the kid’s age as fourteen. “Where are we? You better not try to bleed me.”

Shaa raised an eyebrow. “Certainly not. Do you take me for a barbarian?”

“You said you were a physician.” The kid shook his head, trying to clear it.

“Well struck,” Shaa said. “Although I practice medicine, I do so with discretion. Allow me to emphasize the element of discretion, and your present degree of relative safety in having been removed from the street.”

“The street -” The kid tensed, spun around to stare through the window, then spun back. “What do you want?” he said in sudden desperation.

Shaa, who had allowed his eyebrow to drop, raised it again. “You present a matter for curiosity, and potential professional interest. How far behind you do you think your pursuers actually were, by the way?”

“You’re holding me for the Guard, aren’t you,” the boy said, his attempt at a snarl emerging as more of a whine.

Shaa spread his hands. “I understand a certain need for caution, especially with your condition, but let’s not get ridiculous. If I had wanted to turn you over to the Guard, or anyone else for that matter, the difficulty would have been minimal.”

“I don’t know you and I don’t need you. I’m getting out of here.”

“Be my guest. Perhaps you actually did lose them.”

The kid hesitated, then rose. “On the other hand,” Shaa said, “perhaps you didn’t.” Shaa glared up at him. The kid plopped down. “Sir,” Shaa went on, “may I note that this is getting us nowhere.”

The kid leaned over the table and hissed, “All right, you. I need a sorcerer. Are you a sorcerer?”

“No,” Shaa drawled, extracting the vowel as slowly if it were a recalcitrant tooth, although “Not at the moment” would have been more precise. “In any case, I doubt that’s exactly what you need; magicians tend to be overrated. What’s your name?”

“Jurtan. Jurtan Mont.” The kid suddenly sounded exhausted. He had had enough fortitude to keep it back thus far, though. Perhaps he had potential. “Are you from around here, Mr. Shaa?”

“Shaa will do. I pass through every now and then.” He signalled the owner, raised two fingers. “Do you drink?” Shaa said as an afterthought, as the man scuttled back to his kegs and splashed froth.

“Uh … yeah, yeah sure.”

“You should try it, my first prescription. A modest dose of alcohol may reduce the frequency of your attacks.”

“My attacks? What are you talking about - what do you know about -”

“Alcohol changes the level of irritability of the central nervous system,” Shaa said. The owner dropped the drinks on the table, sloshing the contents of Shaa’s over the lip of the mug. Shaa moved to the left along his bench, avoiding a runoff channel. “Drink up.”

Jurtan Mont took up one mug, looking suspiciously at it.

“You’re sure this is healthy?”

Shaa peered over the rim of his own mug, sniffed. “You have a point. Still, you are on the run, so by definition you need every possible advantage you can get.”

Mont’s face tightened and turned a sudden white. “I know what I’m doing, I don’t need you to insult me.”

Shaa looked up at the ceiling, silently asking the universe if it knew quite what it was doing this time. “Look, my putative friend, I have much of value to offer, and I am offering it, provisionally, for free, so if you would please stop trying to find -”

Jurtan Mont swung his mug and tossed the contents at Shaa’s face. Shaa, demonstrating a level of agility not expected from his generally stocky frame, flipped himself off the bench, did a backward somersault, and fetched up with his neck wedged against the bar, avoiding most of the flying ale. “I don’t need you and I don’t want you,” Mont said again, and stalked toward the door. He kicked it open, walked two steps through it, and went slack. The trio of paddlers was still thomping away across the street.

A chorus of cries and the tumult of running feet burst from the left side out of view down the block. Shaa staggered to his feet. A small band of rapidly charging men appeared in the leftmost windows. Swearing under his breath, Shaa ran through the bar toward the collapsing Mont. The lead Guardsman shouted, “There, there he is! It’s him!” with his arm out pointing at Mont.

Behind him were more soldiers, a whole troop in fact.

Without stopping, Shaa grabbed a mug from the last table and hurled it as he slid through the doorway. The mug flew past Mont’s ear and shattered against the nose of the first soldier. Shaa skidded to a stop as the rest of the platoon converged on the bar, snagged the back of Mont’s collar, and heaved. Mont’s feet left the pavement, he flew parabolically backward through the doorway into the Bilious Gnome, and as he fell to the floor Shaa let go of his collar, slammed the door, and overturned the closest table in front of it.

Glass splintered. Shaa looked up and saw a Guardsman climbing through the remains of one of the oval front windows. The door heaved with a sound of creaking wood as it was hit by the weight of four strong men. Shaa looked around, then put his foot on the end of a bench and shoved. The bench slid across the floor and into the knee of the window-climbing Guardsman, who had just jumped to the floor. The knee folded sideways and the man fell against the wall. Shaa hoisted the semi-conscious Mont by his shirt and headed for the stairs.

“My window!” the tapster yelled. Then, “My other window, oh, gods, what next?”

“What indeed?” Shaa murmured. Mont took on his own weight and reeled up the stairs as three windows disgorged Guardsmen behind them. Shaa ran after him, hearing the front door disintegrate. Mont stopped at the top of the staircase and turned to look back. His mouth dropped open. Shaa swung an elbow at him, knocking him through the door leading off the landing, and then with his other hand withdrew a small membranous bladder from beneath his cloak. The bladder bulged and churned, its shimmering silver surface dancing with rainbow highlights like the skin of a fish. Shaa paused in the doorway, looking back at the five soldiers starting after him up the stairs, and grinned at them. He worked a fleshy valve on the bladder and carefully squirted a small stream of liquid onto the two beams holding the staircase to the wall. The liquid foamed, sizzled, and dug through the wood with astonishing speed. The staircase leaned over with a horrendous grinding screech, and then, with an even louder crack, it broke off, pivoted over, and hit the floor in one long THUDD! that shook the building, not to mention the soldiers who had been climbing it. A small noxious cloud hung in the air. Shaa bowed, stamped on the clutching fingers of the lead soldier, clinging desperately to the now-stairless sill, listened for the thump, and closed the door. “Fortunately they have yet to bring archers,” he said, clapped the dazed Mont on a shoulder, and sprinted down the hall.