Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Catastrophe

“What’s going on down there?” Karlini said.-

I was looking straight ahead with my jaw locked and my mind wound around “HELP KARLINI!”, and so I saw it start to happen. The disc of clouds overhead had been dropping; just as they reached the spire of the castle’s tallest tower the whole castle strobed white, flickered, and began to fade. Roosing Oolvaya lights glimmered behind it. Next to me in the boat, Max was still unconscious. He’d been out for the count, but maybe he was warming up a bit - he’d started coughing, thrashing his head against the water now splashing over him from the wind-driven waves breaking on the boat, and his hand was fluttering. His hand? I touched the ring to it. A puff of pale blue filled with snaky lines like the core of a bramble bush boiled up out of the air and shot up the beam toward Karlini. I thought I heard a voice say, “Max! I’m loose!”, and then a length of blue thread tumbled out of the sky like a snapped kite string and coiled across the boat.

High up on the castle, at the ragged base of the tower Max had ridden down to the river, another dot appeared and started to fall. I could see that the dot was turning into the figure of a man, and that was too bad because it was falling outward from the castle but not out far enough, and there was a stone wall and a cluster of small buildings in its way long before the waves. Except-

Except he’d timed things better than I had, and he knew more about what was happening too; so when he hit the uppermost roof in his path a second later the castle was by then no more than an outlined ghost drawn in spiderweb against the city, insubstantial as a cloud and fading further, and he passed straight through it without a catch and continued in the same trajectory toward the water. The water - THE WATER!

The castle was gone, and all of a sudden there was a big castle-sized hole in the river where there had been rock an instant before, and the water was starting to pour into it like a falling cliff. It was hopeless, hopeless for all of us, but I grabbed for the oars. Karlini fell. Then, suddenly behind him in the midst of the cloud of thrown spray, behind him and coming up fast - a white shape, a large growing moving shape, the shape of a giant bird! Bird and Karlini disappeared as the rowboat rocked, the incredible pull of the cataract dragging us backward. I was thinking “HELP!” and “RESCUE!” and other such things but nothing was happening, nothing good anyway, nothing but the downhill slide of the boat; another couple of seconds maximum and that was going to be that. A flicker of motion at the side, low above the waves - the bird again!, coming toward me with labored wing beats that barely cleared the water, Karlini no longer in the air by himself or in the river but in the dangling claws of the bird; and that was great for him but there was no way the bird could manage another person-sized passenger, let alone two. I dropped the oars, spun, yanked the boat’s rope out from under Max, and hurled it into the air. The rope tangled, uncoiled, started to fall, the bird flashed by overhead, the rowboat spun down the smooth rushing surface of the torrent - the rope snapped taut! The eyebolt at the prow where the end of rope was knotted creaked and began to tear through the wood. I grabbed the rope and strained back against it as hard as I could …

But the long moment passed and the rope held, and the hole behind us in the water filled, and the waves and giant ripples began to race anew back and forth across the surface of the river. The bird let go of the rope and soared exhaustedly away, and I picked up the oars.

From the bottom of the boat I heard a loud groan. I looked down.

Max had one eye half-open with part of its pupil showing, and was trying to lever himself up with a hand on the side of the boat. “Karlini?” he croaked.

“Under control.”

“Castle?”

“Up and gone.”

Max’s eye slumped closed and he sagged back into the bilge. “Well,” he said faintly, “I guess that was all simple enough.”

It was finally Godsday. On Godsday in a city like Roosing Oolvaya, where no particular god held unchallenged domination, shops were usually open and people went about whatever commerce they chose; other people, of course, typically scurried from temple to temple, currying their accustomed favor. This was not a typical Godsday, though, and so three activities were the most popular - cleaning up and dredging out, appealing to the gods, and appealing to the spirits; the remaining bars were packed. Cleanup might take weeks, reconstruction would take even longer, and the owners of the two intact shipyards would become very rich, but all of that felt very long-term at the moment. Even with all the work to be done, many of the luckier inhabitants of Roosing Oolvaya (and everyone who had survived considered themselves lucky, at least in some measure) felt they deserved at least a moment’s celebration.

The common-floor of the Bilious Gnome might have been mistaken for a hospital sickroom, what with the number of bruised, smashed, splinted, and wrapped people in attendance. Few people in sickrooms, though, could tear through a freshly roasted side of beef with the abandon of Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable, who, beneath a liberal swath of bandages, looked as though he had just come off a three-month stretch of dedicated dieting. Attempting to match him bite-for-bite from across the large table, and falling further and further behind, was the Great Karlini. “Watch out with that gravy, dear,” said Ronibet, wiping a small brownish glob from her sleeve,

“It’s all Max’s fault, anyway,” Karlini said, pausing in mid-chew and sliding the words out the side of his mouth.

Max pointed a knife at him. “Don’t forget who wandered into a castle that didn’t belong to him in the first place.”

Karlini said something else around his mouthful of food that this time was totally unintelligible. “You’d better not repeat that,” Max said.

Wroclaw had produced a damp cloth and was devoting his professional attention to the gravy spot. He bent to scrutinize his handiwork, lowering his mouth to the level of Roni’s ear. “Master Maximillian’s level of agitation is still uncommonly high,” he said in a low voice.

“It’s Shaa,” Roni murmured. “He’s worried about Shaa.” Wroclaw glanced casually toward the end of the table.

“With some justification, it would appear.”

Shaa was reclining in a large mud-encrusted chair that was covered by a fairly clean sheet, his legs elevated and outstretched along a bench. He had a flagon balanced on the chair’s armrest. “Thank you, no,” Shaa said to Jurtan Mont, who was reaching toward the flagon with the refill pitcher. “I am suspicious enough of this beverage as it is.” Shaa sniffed ostentatiously at his cup, then broke into a sudden paroxysm of wet coughing.

Max looked sharply up. He gazed down the table at Shaa, his face blank. Shaa indicated the flagon, “Noxious emanations,” he said. “It is possible that water has inadvertently been substituted for the requested ale. Could I interest you in a verifying taste?”

“I’ve had enough water in the last few days to hold me for the next five years,” Max said. “Try it on your poison tester, there.”

Jurtan Mont, who was of course the individual to whom Max had alluded, opened his mouth to try a rejoinder. His sister Tildamire kicked him under the table. “A wise woman,” Shaa murmured approvingly to her. “Responding to Max can often lead to complications. Would you appropriate the asparagus?”

Max’s attention had already wandered. Recuperation from a bad spell-drain ordinarily left his mind part vegetable, and that part mostly onion, garlic, and other roots known for their nasty temperament. The major thing on which he had focused his limited concentration was indeed the problem of Shaa. Shaa had insisted on making it in from the street under his own power, but the effort had left him breathless and drenched in sweat; his face was still white and his breathing difficult now, almost two hours later. It was graphic confirmation of his state. Shaa had told Max earlier that in his professional opinion as a physician, he might last six months. On the other hand, medical science being as imprecise as it was, the time could be closer to six weeks. Or, he had added, a miracle could occur. With Shaa’s resistance to magic-based cures, though, fixing him would be a knotty problem. Of course, Max did have some ideas. It was about time to rid Shaa of those damn curses anyway.