Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Catastrophe

Max’s thoughts were gooey and his lungs (the air blown out of them by the impact) were filling with water, his head throbbed with waves of agony, but the one principle he had programmed down to the depths of his personality was Do Not Die Until You’re Ready! He made the pain goad him, he slid, he clawed, he wrenched, he shoved, he pulverized a stone slab with the last gasp of his transfused power, he fended off another section of wall tumbling more slowly toward the riverbed, and at last there was nothing above him but water, but there seemed to be an awful lot of water and no surface he could find …

Then something had him by the shirt, a hand, pulling him upward - air! - and over a low gunwale of raw wood onto a pile of rope in some kind of small boat. Max retched up water and desperately sucked in air, his eyes still closed and his mind sloshing in the bottom of his skull like melted gelatin. “Roni?” he croaked.

“What are you talking about?” It wasn’t Roni’s voice, it wasn’t even the voice of a woman, but it was familiar. Max’s mind staggered up and began to put itself in gear. “I’m -”

“The Creeping Sword,” Max gasped, coughing over the side.

“Yeah, right, I found your friend Shaa, he’s safe back in the city, and -”

Max spit once more, then turned to gaze upwards, still drawing in loud gulps of air through his open mouth but now making himself take notice of the scene above, forcing himself not to close his eyes under the pain. The tower had taken a wide section of lower wall with it as it fell; smoke and vapor hung behind in the sky. A spray of multicolored curlicues and shooting fireworks was erupting out from the high gash where the tower had been attached, casting bursts of sharp light through the billowing clouds of dust; hopefully that meant Karlini was alive and still working in the rubble. Above the castle and winding through the spires, a compact red sun swooped and darted in swift arcs like a tailless kite bound down by the keel-line. Pieces of stone flowed like putty toward it as it passed; in fact, the castle’s entire upper works had started to sag and melt. The castle’s heartbeat rhythm of pulsing change was visibly accelerating. One of the rotating towers detached itself and slid toward the water, then abruptly changed its mind and tumbled upward into the sky. The red fireball swept down again toward the river, close enough for Max to make a quick check on the confinement field - it was holding, most of the way around, but the last critical tie-points were starting to decay. “What a mess,” Max muttered across a thick tongue. “If I only had that damned ring I could -”

“What ring?” said the Creeping Sword, suddenly hearing Max through his own running commentary and interrupting himself in mid-remark. “You mean Oskin Yahlei’s ring? I’ve got it.”

Max whirled his head. It was a mistake, it had almost made him pass out, but - “You WHAT?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it here, I spotted it -”

“Where is it? Quick! Give it to - no, wait a minute, yeah - you hold it.”

“What are -”

“Shut up and hold still, you’ve just gone from contingency plan to center stage.”

“Now wait a second -”

“Look up there and then give me another cute remark,” Max snapped. He was gesturing furiously with both hands, digging down past the bottom of his energy store, the corner of his lower lip clenched intently between his teeth. A blue coupling-disc formed itself reluctantly in front of the Creeping Sword’s chest. The disc wobbled, and the concave surface facing the Sword turned yellow and purple in a checkerboard pattern. In the maze of fine structures on the back of the disc, new connections were growing.

Something large landed near them in the water, splattering molten gravel around the boat. The Creeping Sword opened his mouth.

“You wanted to be clear of Gashanatantra, didn’t you?” Max snarled. “Well, this may do it.” The disc sank onto the Sword’s chest, delicate tendrils reaching out from it into his body. “I’m going to try to couple Gash’s power through his link to you into the containment field in the ring. Get out the ring and hold it up, and keep that sword of yours under control.”

The walking stick that was the Sword’s sword in disguise had started to whine. “Shut up,” the Sword muttered at it, fumbling at his belt.

A pillar of harsh red shot out of the fireball and across the sky in a focused beam; one apex of the confinement matrix had finally decayed and was leaking out. The disc on the Creeping Sword’s chest burst into sudden blue life with a vibrant hum. The Sword choked back a “Yeaow!” and held up the ring. An array of lenses and hovering silver meshwork herders had emerged from the disc and were passing through each other, jockeying for position. Max growled at them.

In the red glare that illuminated the castle and the river and threw highlights across the city waterfront and the Palace of the Venerance, something else was forming - a bank of clouds, emanating from a point directly over the castle and blowing out radially, starting a clockwise spin. A pinwheel of silver electricity spiraled out from behind a battlement and arched out toward the water. “Here we go,” Max said, making a last gesture and folding his fingers together tip-first to let them writhe under his palm. A whiff of dust shot out of the back of his hand and curled toward the chest of the Creeping Sword. The dust spun into the coupling-disc.

The disc flashed lightning-blue and seemed to lengthen itself backward into the Sword’s chest cavity, through it, behind it, elongating into a tunnel, stretching off in a zigzagging warp. The Creeping Sword looked down, an unsettled expression on his face, and had started to say, “I don’t think Gash likes -” when with a loud WHOOOEEERLL!!. something appeared in the far distance of the tunnel and hurtled back out toward them, a form of solid royal blue so sharp it burned the eyes; it bashed out through the disc in a thick rippling column, constricted itself into a point, and leapt toward the ring. The ring burst out in a hot burning gold as the blue column sliced down its bore and looped into the sky. Fifty feet above the river it disappeared against the night black.

Max’s eyes were slitted, watching the careening red fireball. One second, two - where was that thing? It wasn’t working! Forget it now, they were all doomed, and –

A round spot of blue appeared on the side of the fireball. The grid of the confinement field stood out suddenly like a glyph writ in lightning, blue lightning, the blue spot pulsed and flowed out, the ball flashed with competing forces - WHOOOM!! - silver-white with the blinding impact of an exploding sun washed the scene with glare. The world broke into two colors - the upper face of the castle and the near face of the Palace and the wave-peaks radiated a smoking flaring silver, and the shadows and hollows behind cast the dead black of the abyss. Waves of thunder rolled. Then -

The air was suddenly still. The thunder faded to mere echoes returning from the hills, the glare easing to afterimages. Near at hand, Max heard a low sucking, slurping sound - SLOIAYERRRULLP! - against the dying booms of the thunder. The space inside the ring flashed once, red running to blue, and the colors spun out and fell against the surface of the metal. A nimbus of ghostly blue wafted through the ring and dissolved slowly in the air. “Well?” said the Creeping Sword.

“Let’s put it this way,” Max said. He was having trouble putting words together, and his vision was refusing to clear. “Don’t try - don’t try to wear that ring or, or we’re going to have to go through all of this another time.”

“Then you did what you were trying to do?”

“Yeah, we got lucky.”