Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

“I said I would.”

“Very well. Let us be off, then.”

The closest thing to a coach in the vicinity just then was a garish rickshaw. Shaa instructed the driver, gave a last wave of acknowledgement to Leen, and let the vehicle clop away.

Shaa had taken the opportunity to reconnoiter his destination several days earlier. The location was not exactly obscure, and his goal at the moment was not what you would call clandestine, but it never hurt to know the lay of the land. It would be important to bring the Karlinis up to date - and perhaps the Creeping Sword would have something of value to add too, you never knew - but the Jardin situation seemed more urgent. Although did he remember how to work remote communications? What was Karlini’s recipient address key? Shaa sank back and closed his eyes...

Either he wasn’t doing it right or Karlini was for some reason off the line. What about -

The rickshaw lurched forward. “We here,” the driver announced.

So they were. Shaa paid off and crossed the gleaming sidewalk. The grand entry ahead above a flight of wide stairs would lead through a collonaded aisle to the temple proper, a rectangular building with a broad nave ending in an apse. He had, after all, reconnoitered. He would not be going as far as the apse, though, and even the nave was in question. Instead, he glanced around the lobby, reorienting himself, and then approached the woman who was obviously, from the number of jewels on her breastplate, the senior priest on duty. She sat on a well-cushioned chair with a high, fluted back behind a desk laden with forms for the requesting of indulgences, casting an eagle glare around the sparse traffic trickling in and out. “By the look of you you’re here for something major,” the august one addressed Shaa.

Yes, Shaa thought, but it’s hardly what you think. “I need to see Her Godship,” he declared, “and don’t tell me she’s not in town because I know she is.”

The priest’s gaze hardened. “My Lord does not treat with buffoons. You must perform your supplication in the traditional manner, and as ardently as possible. I advise you to go clean yourself up before presenting yourself here again. Only the holiest of human -”

“If Her Godship finds out you kept me waiting she’ll break you back to a newt.”

She raised her nose and eyed him superciliously along it. “Thoroughly out of the question. The supplication line begins down there, in the nave. Either join it or leave. Or do you have the resource for an indulgence?” She had been joined at either side by a guard bearing an anything-but-ceremonial pike.

Shaa realized he was rather looking forward to something like this. Now we’ll see about that heart, he thought. But responsibility still came before pleasure. “I have tidings that won’t wait, concerning Jardin, Master of Curses.”

That did slow her down, at least until the old girl decided again Shaa was merely a mad person of the streets. “Then tell me your words. I will convey them.”

Shaa released one of his more sardonic grins. “Up to you. The news is he’s been pulverized.”

The priest went white. “He’s been - how would you -” She released a most unpriestly imprecation and rose to her feet. “Follow me – no, wait. You! Acolyte!”

A pair of matching pimply kids in low-order robes stood at attention on either side of the door to the cathedral proper. They were both looking at Shaa’s priest. The nearer one pointed uncertainly at his own chest. The priest glared at him and made a violent gesture with her arm. The kid scrambled over. “Guide this man downstairs as fast as you can.”

The pikemen joined Shaa in a trot as behind them, the priest he had confronted gathered up the indulgences, thrust them into a lower drawer, and took off without another look round in the other direction, out the exit door and onto the street. Perhaps, Shaa thought, as the lobby disappeared out of sight around the corner of the staircase they were now descending toward the innards of the temple, she is unwilling to be associated in even a circumstantial way with the delivery of bad news. Of course, if that was the source of prudence - as there was no doubt it was - then just what did he think he was doing?

Unfortunately, what came naturally. Debarking from the staircase and wandering a short maze of passages, Shaa and his escorts came upon a tall chamber with a polished obsidian floor and twinkly wall hangings. Shaa averted his eyes as much as possible from the garish furnishings and fixed his gaze on the armed priest contingent at the far end. Then they had crossed the room and the acolyte was confronting his betters, trying to explain the errand that had brought him here.

Shaa considered using another misdirection spell. Deploying magic in a god’s own sanctum was considered one of the riskier maneuvers, all things considered, by those who had studied the issue from afar; the maneuver had been studied from afar since those who had attempted it were not generally available for feedback. But there was misdirection, and misdirection.

Shaa waited until the assembled ecclesiastics had glanced at him again and then retreated back into their huddle; then he took a half-step back and edged to the side. One of his guard-escorts turned to follow him. Shaa rested a gentle hand on the guard’s pike shaft, but then somehow the butt of the pike ended up between the fellow’s legs with its business end tangling with the tunic of the other escort, and then both escorts were hanging onto each other to keep from falling to the floor, their feet slipping and skidding on the slick obsidian surface, and then they were falling to the floor anyway in a mess of flailing arms and waving staffs. All eyes turned to the cascading guards; all eyes, that is, except for Shaa’s, which were fixed securely on the door he was approaching on a rapid lope from a oblique angle. Then the shouting was suddenly and obviously directed at him, but by then he was through the door and shutting it securely again behind himself.

The room Shaa found himself occupying had the look of a law library. Bookcases filled with matched leather-bound tomes crept up the walls, punctuated by banks of filing cabinets and several large desks. Even apart from the furniture, however, Shaa was not occupying the room alone. Three people were facing each other in front of a tall wall-mirror, their expressions indicating mutual astonishment.

“We meet again,” Shaa said to the first personage, the woman he’d met on the dock on his arrival in Peridol, whom he had subsequently researched, and whom he had come to her temple expecting to see. “As do we,” he added to the Creeping Sword as well, although he had surely not expected him. And then, to be comprehensive and to fully observe the social niceties, he addressed with a courteous bow the third member of the group, only now fully emerging from the mirror. “The pleasure is mine,” proclaimed Shaa. “The true Gashanatantra, I presume.”

So it had come to this. But what was ‘this,’ really? Other than a serious overstatement of his reputation?

His body was strapped rigidly to a sledge. Pillory blocks had been locked across his ankles, his legs at mid-calf and mid-thigh, his lower and upper body, and the upper arm. Each hand had been forced into a steely glove, and then cords had been passed through the tie-down rings at the end of each finger and lashed firmly to a spread-eagle frame. The sledge in its turn had been chained down to the walls of the dungeon cell with enough footage of hawser to have moored a good-sized schooner.

As if that wasn’t enough, a grilled mask like an animal muzzle covered his face from the nose on down, and a carved mouthpiece kept his lips parted and his tongue mashed uncomfortably against his lower gums. Did they think he was going to bite someone’s nose off unless forcibly restrained? He was scarcely a homicidal maniac, Max reflected; if nothing else he was far too cultured for that, yet here he was in -