Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Catastrophe

“Karlini, must help. Progressing is evacuation -”

Haddo broke off and squawked angrily at the bird. The bird banked sharply right, skimmed a wall, flapped once more, skimmed the ridge of a slate roof, and brought its wings up, cupping them underneath; the three of them paused abruptly in mid-air and then dropped. Below the bird and rushing up at them was the landing-field. Ten feet above the field the bird opened its claws; Max, who’d been anticipating this, curled free and rolled down onto the grass. The bird glided across the field, grabbed a bundle of books and other packages wrapped in a net, stuck its left wing in the air and snapped to the right, and passed out of sight just above another wall and a line of chimneys. Max came to his feet and trotted across the field. A man with sacks over both shoulders came out of a door in front of him.

“Oh, good,” said the Great Karlini, swinging the sacks to the ground, “you’ve showed up.”

“You can thank Haddo,” Max said, “yet another time. You don’t want to find out what you’d do without him. But things downstairs in this castle of yours are getting pretty hairy; I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get up here on my own. What’s the situation?”

Karlini began stuffing sacks and loose books into another net. “We’d gotten ready to evacuate like you suggested, so we’re almost finished, now. This is the end of the stuff from the towers, and Wroclaw’s got a boat downstairs. Roni’s with him.”

A rolling tremor ran through the castle, followed by the rumble of stone collapsing somewhere out of sight. “Yeah,” Max said, “and what about you?”

Karlini swallowed and gnawed on his lip. “I still can’t leave. Whatever it is that’s locked into me hasn’t turned itself off.”

“I was afraid of that,” Max muttered. “The Death may have a manual override on your hook-line, but he’s got to be sentient to use it, all of which means we’ve got to get you loose ourselves, unless of course we can think of some way to get the Death calmed down and make him friendly at the same time.”

“It does look that way. You have any ideas?”

Max had flipped down his lens and was studying Karlini through it. Karlini’s form was suffused with a vague skeleton of wispy black, but unlike the construct Max had just fought, the streamers inside Karlini were self-contained, with no apparent connection to the rest of the castle’s energy matrix. “I think there’s some resonant effect going between you and the castle,” Max said. “Maybe if we can destabilize the castle field we can pry you loose. If we destabilize the field we may also be able to bleed off energy from the Death, which may make him more tractable if we hit him with something like a confinement shell.”

Karlini shrugged. “Okay. How?”

“What did you find out from your probes after I left?”

“Well,” Karlini said, “I couldn’t get past the defenses on the power reservoir, but I did manage to sneak a tap into the energy transmission system; I think I can run a shunt if we need it. Oh!, - I also found the castle’s jump engine, figured out part of the activation mechanism too. That thing takes a lot of power. Unfortunately, all of these contraptions are embedded in the foundation, and the foundation’s under thirty feet of water.”

“That’s going to be a problem,’· Max said. “I don’t think we have the extra time to set up a dive-bubble, so we’ll have to work it remote. The way I see it, we’ve got to handle these things together at the same time: we have to get the Death under control, move this castle out of the river, and pry you loose, keeping ourselves alive at the same time.” A large shape rose into the air beyond the wall at the end of the field, becoming Haddo and the bird. They glided over the yard, snatched the last net off the ground, and swooped off into the night.

Max and Karlini straightened. “That’s it for the airlift,” Karlini said, “so I guess that means we have to get back to work.”

“Right. Where’s the tower with our friend the mad god?”

“This way.” Karlini took off across the field and through a doorway, Max right behind him. “I know a route that’ll get us around the worst of the obstacles.”

“The god will be pulling a lot of power himself,” Max said. “We can bleed off some of that energy to fuel a beat-resonance wave and try to overload the stability focus-points. The castle will have to feed more power into the stabilizers, and that’ll make them stand out against the matrix background; we superimpose a shunt surge on top of the resonance wave, tell it to home in on the stabilization loci, change the beat frequency, and maybe we can blow the stabilizers out. With all that going on the god should be weakened enough for the confinement shell to work.”

“Did you bring the ring?” Karlini said, heading up a long flight of stairs. The castle was quieter in this section, and the space-warping effects and perceptual illusions that had hit Max lower down were much less flagrant. A wall rippled and changed texture on the left, but the stairs were stable.

“No, damn it; it disappeared in the mess when the Death got out. You were wrong, you know - there was only one Death, not two. Just the Death from this castle, and Oskin Yahlei using his power.”

“But you don’t have the ring.”

“I did the best I could. It’ll make the confinement more difficult but I think we can still pull it off. While I’m doing the incarceration, you’ll set the jump engines to trigger off a time-decay fuse-”

“Where are we going to send the castle?”

“We don’t want to drop it on another populated area, what it’s done to Roosing Oolvaya’s been enough. I’m sure there isn’t enough power around to throw it into orbit ... probably the safest place is the middle of the ocean.”

“It may be simpler to return it to wherever it started from in the first place,” Karlini said, coming out the top of the stairs and charging to the right along a hallway; the ceiling of the hall was shifting between gray stone and a translucent gauze-like substance that glowed bright yellow. “I think that location’s programmed into the mechanism.”

“Fine,” said Max. “You set the jump engine to activate however you want, as long as we have enough time to get out of here first, and while we’re getting out I’ll deal with your hook-field; the power flux should be low enough by then to be able to shake you loose. Well, what do you think, is it all going to work?”

Karlini paused at the foot of a new circular stair leading up into a tower opening off their current hall and glanced back over his shoulder at Max. “You’re the expert in gods, not me. What do you think?”

“… Iffy,” Max said. “I don’t really understand all the guts of this second-level stuff yet, and we’ll be trying some pretty complicated manipulcations. I don’t know if we’ll have enough power to make up for the inexperience.”

“Are there any alternatives?”

“I do have one other idea, but I don’t even want to try it unless we absolutely have to.”

“… One of those.”

“Yeah,” Max said, “it’s one of those, all right.”

Karlini had cocked his head and closed his eyes, apparently listening to something somewhere else. He opened his eyes, straightened again, and squared his shoulders. “Roni and Wroclaw are pulling away,” he said. “This is it, then.”

“Right.” Max had been sketching in the air, and now another headband with vision-disc settled over Karlini’s brow. Through the lenses, they could see giant cables of winding black coming together from all parts of the surrounding structure and funneling upward through the tower walls, coiling around each other and merging together as they rose toward the tower’s peak and the mad Death. Max dragged an armchair away from an end-table in the hall, plopped it down at the base of the stairs, and began making passes over it. One of his coupling-intermediary disk-formations took shape above the seat cushion.