Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Catastrophe

“What about Gash?”

“I don’t know, don’t know.” The wind was coming up again; a sheet of water blew off the crest of a river swell and sloshed into the boat. “Now gotta get Karlini.” Overhead, the wheel of clouds was thickening. The upper works of the castle glowed a sullen molten red, drooping and smoldering in strange liquid forms. Max felt out along the spell-guide. “Karlini! Karlini, you there?”

“Max?” The sound of Karlini’s voice was distant and weak. “Glad you’re back - the castle’s about ready to go.”

Max’s vision was not clearing, it was getting worse, it was closing in from the sides in a dark band. The throb of his head filled the air. The voice of the Creeping Sword sounded as far away as Karlini’s. “Max? Max!”

He was wobbling in the stern of the rowboat, looking up at the castle and talking to somebody who wasn’t there, his left arm half-raised and his right knee slowly folding, and them he just settled to one side, fell over on the rope piled in the bilge, and came to rest with his head hanging out over the gunwale. He’d bled off so much weight since I’d seen him earlier that he looked like a victim of sudden starvation - his clothes were dangling on him like sheets - and the parts of him exposed to the air seemed pretty well bashed in under the nasty red glow from the castle. “Max?” I said again, but he was out. And he’d left me holding the bag.

Gash was still back there somewhere, I could feel him, but Max’s little trick had taken him by surprise; he was weakened too, so I didn’t think I had to worry about him for a while. The real problem now wasn’t Gash, it was Max. He’d given me a pretty rough time, treating me the way I don’t let anybody treat me, using me as a convenient tool for his own schemes, not seeming to care whether he killed me in the process. And the process had hurt - my chest where he’d slapped his blue whatever-it-was spell felt like the riverfront of Roosing Oolvaya looked. Not only that, it had hurt Gash too, and I’d felt that at second-hand back through the metabolic link; I’d really gotten it coming and going. I wasn’t sure how I was able to be on my own feet myself, but I was, and I had to make some quick decisions because I was the one on the spot.

The simplest thing would be to forget this guy Shaa, forget the other friend Max had been talking to up in that castle, whatever his problem was and whatever Max had intended to do about it, and just roll Max over the side back into the river. If he came looking, I could tell Shaa I hadn’t made it out here in time, and if I really had to I could blow town or lay low for a few months. Yeah, most likely somebody would come after me, but I’d had people after me before; probably still did, for that matter, it was part of the business. The important point was that I could get rid of Max, right now, and I’d never have a better shot. Not only was it reasonably the best idea for me, it had a lot to recommend it from a purely good-sense and good-of-the-community viewpoint.

I hate magic, and one reason is the mess it’s made of the world; magic is more destabilizing than any other force of man or nature. Add a little magic to a situation and just watch how quickly things get out of hand. I didn’t know how much of the current disaster had been caused by Max and his crew and how much of it they’d been fighting themselves, but now my favorite city was a wreck, who knew how many people were dead, river trade could be ruined for years, and what really had been solved? It was infighting in a small group, that’s what it was, and all it did was trample people trying to live their lives and stay out of the way. If I took out Max it looked like I’d be ridding the world of a prime player in a game I didn’t like.

I almost made myself do it, I really almost did, and in a way, that shocked me more than anything else, because it was the kind of thing I’d promised myself I’d never ever do again. This mess had woken feelings I’d been trying to grapple with for years. They say you learn. They say you do what you have to do and after awhile you get used to it, but I’d done things years before when I was nothing but a dumb hired-sword punk kid that still hung dark in my memory, making me squirm whenever I thought of them and sending me out in the street to do something nice for some other poor dumb idiot. Maybe I just had a resistance to education. On the other hand, either we’re all going to be barbarians, or somebody has to rein themselves in, decide when they’re going to draw their own line, or decide when there’s something they have to do because they think it’s the right thing to do, even if it doesn’t directly benefit themselves, even if sometime it may be incompatible with their own survival. I’d done that, and that was the way I tried to live my life.

What is a good guy, really? Somebody who has principles and stands up for them? Somebody who does the right thing when they have a choice? Maybe. But what’s the right thing? Keep the strong from taking over the world? Sometimes. Don’t murder people if you can help it? Some people deserve murdering, so what then? Help out your friends? Usually. But what was the answer, the real answer? Damned if I know, and anyway the situation didn’t demand the whole book; on the scale of potential crucibles this one was pretty small, the whole affair was relatively minor to anyone who wasn’t actually in Roosing Oolvaya at the moment. It didn’t matter. I didn’t know what a good guy was, but I always thought of myself as one of them. I could see Max thought of himself the same way. Both of us tried to do the right thing as we saw it, even if it wasn’t necessarily the right thing for us. If I threw Max back in the water I couldn’t think of myself as the kind of person I wanted to be anymore, and that was worth a lot more to me than avoiding the trouble I’d surely inherit by keeping him alive.

So Max collapsed in the stern and I had to think of what he’d want me to do next.

The most urgent problem would be this Karlini person he’d been talking to. The water around the submerged base of the castle was foaming and churning, piles of large bubbles were boiling up around it, and the general tenor of the dancing lights on the walls and the descending cloud bank overhead seemed to imply that the castle was building up to a big event, and that event was coming real soon. Max had a link to Karlini back up in the castle and Karlini would be waiting for Max to help bail him out of some Jam. Under the circumstances, my bet was that the thing Karlini needed bailing out of was the castle itself.

I could see a faint light-blue glow starting at Max’s left hand and looping off toward the castle. I dropped down next to him and stuck my own hand in that beam. What had Max done? - it looked like he’d just talked. “Hello?” I said. “Anybody there? Karlini?”

Sure enough, I heard a faint voice. “Who are you?” it said. “Where’s Max?”

“Max isn’t doing too well, he’s out cold. What kind of help did you need from him?”

I thought I heard a low “auugh!” kind of sound from the other end. Then, “If you need to ask, I’m sunk.”

“Karlini!” I said. “I may be able to shoot you some more power, if that’ll help.”

“I don’t know what he was going to try,” Karlini muttered, “and this castle’s going to move any second.”

I still had the ring in my hand, clenched on my palm in a fist; tingling waves of heat were spreading out from it through my hand and up my arm. I still had Gash’s metabolic link, too. Between the two of them they had to be good for something. I put my other hand, the one holding the ring, in the beam, and started to concentrate. Help Karlini, I thought. Help Karlini! I’d had practice with this kind of thing twice before, now, even if those episodes hadn’t worked quite as planned; this time it was coming more easily. I got my other hand free and slapped Max across the face a few times for good measure, splashed some water in his eyes. The blue beam rippled.