Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

“He wasn’t here,” said Tildy.

Before Jurtan could say anything else, the seagull slammed into him again with its webbed feet extended, knocking him forward and into his sister. The music in his head, which had been playing a pretty demoralizing dirge, broke ranks with a mocking accordion wheeze. Jurtan seized Tildy around the wrist and yanked her forward. “Come on,” he said, “before that bird decides to do us in.” She dragged along behind him in a dazed shamble.

A moment later, Jurtan saw that the one in the real daze was the Great Karlini. He looked as though he’d just lost his last friend. His last - so that was it! His sister had neglected to mention anything about Ronibet Karlini in her recent experiences.

Becoming aware of their presence with him now, Karlini took in the Monts’ own charred and ash-covered appearances. Tildamire’s arms and face were fried a bright shiny red and her sleeves were barely more than clinging soot. “You were here?” Karlini stated. “What about Roni?”

“Inside,” said Tildy, “I think.”

“What happened?”

With her eyes too wide and her voice too shrill, and her words, when they came at all, trickling out in short meandering bursts, it was plain that Tildamire was barely still in this world herself. “He was different. It was almost like he wasn’t the same person at all. But he threw a fireball at Roni, and it - she -”

“Who?” said Karlini. “Who threw a fireball?”

“The guy with no name. The Creeping Sword.”

The air went out of Karlini and he slumped even further. “Him? Are you sure? What do you mean he wasn’t like the same person?”

“There was - I mean, it looked like light was coming out of his eyes. He looked crazy, out of his mind, he was tearing up everything, and then he threw this fireball and everything went white, I couldn’t see, and -”

“Excuse me,” said a loud voice. Karlini swung around and saw a hefty man in heavy padded oilskins and a stout hard cap with a wide bill brim; an axe swung at his side in a belt sheath. The man had sweat running off his burly mustache. “Fire Chief Cinder. Are you connected with this building?”

“Damn it, yes,” Karlini said.

“Then what’s inside? Why is it burning so hot? You been storing anything toxic we need to worry about?”

Toxic? Oh, crap. Karlini gazed down the block, where the roof of another structure was beginning to show flames. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid there is.”

“Figured as much,” Fire Chief Cinder said with resignation. “That’s Wraith District for you. Something took out our magic user soon as he set up.” Cinder gestured with a gloved hand. Across the street next to the water wagon was another man in a firefighter outfit, lying on his back on the ground staring sightlessly at the sky, his lips moving feebly.

Karlini sighed. “I’d better see what I can do,” he said. Did anyone listen when I tried to tell them this was a bad idea? Of course not. He closed his eyes, raised an exhausted hand, and forced his fingers into the release template for a preliminary probe. Better key it to the containment field on the vats, Karlini thought, start off by making sure those magical organisms of Roni’s are still in their cages. The containment spells should have been good against more than a little fire... but where were they? What had that crazy Creeping Sword guy been doing here, anyway? What -

Karlini’s hand jerked. His personal protection field clicked on, sucked at his energy reserve as he tried to cast loose the probe-tether before this pumped feedback loop got out of control -

- but he’d already depleted his reserve dealing with Dortonn, and he’d been drained even more than that getting in and out of the Tongue Water and then launching on his desperate run across the city, and on top of that there was the added adrenal draw-down from the emotional shock –

Karlini knew when he began to keel over but had no idea if he hit the ground.

When Karlini found out what had happened he was going to want my head. Of course, that would be his first reaction; after he’d had a chance to think about it he’d come up with something really nasty. At the moment, my take on the subject was that if he wanted my head he was welcome to it. It sure hadn’t done me or anyone around me much but lasting harm.

Well, like the saying goes, I hadn’t been careful what I’d wished for, so sure enough that’s what I’d gotten. Now I might have known who I was, but I hadn’t really solved anything. As it had turned out there probably hadn’t been anything I could have done about it either. At least I hoped that was the case. It was one thing if I’d just been trapped in my body, being dragged along for the ride.

But if there had really been something I could have done to prevent it...

“So,” said Gashanatantra.

I opened my eyes and glared at him across from me in the closed carriage. “‘So’? That’s all you can say, ‘so’? ‘So,’ what?”

“Getting testy, are you?”

“Oh, testy, is it? You don’t like testy? You think I should just accept it all and move along, none the worse for wear? You find out your true identity is a homicidal maniac and then tell me about testy.”

“So,” Gash repeated, “now that you have exposed your spleen, what do you propose to do about this situation - Iskendarian?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Isn’t it your name?”

“Damned if I know,” I told him. Damned if I know. We’d obviously been occupying the same body, and the same brain too, him and me, but that was just the trouble. Him and me. I might have been able to dip into the underlying goo beneath both of us and return with some learned skill or the occasional odd fact - and indeed I had - but that was as close I’d come to feeling like he was anything more than the guy in the other room down the hall. I’d naively figured that when I finally broke through to reveal my hidden identity, wiped from sight by the Spell of Namelessness, it would seem familiar. Sure, I thought maybe major areas would still turn out to be gone forever, not merely hidden from sight but scraped clean. What I hadn’t anticipated was that “I” still wouldn’t recall the slightest scrap of memory that would make me remember being whoever-I’d-been. “We” were still utter strangers.

Not strangers like long-lost brothers, either. We didn’t seem anything alike, which was fine with me, but didn’t go any distance toward resolving the question of whether I was responsible for his actions.

On the other hand, another thing that I’d feared hadn’t happened either. I hadn’t been merged into him. I hadn’t ceased to exist as an autonomous being; my personality hadn’t seemed to change, my sense of self was intact - and neither seemed anything at all like his.

A lot of this could be explained if he’d told the truth when he’d said he’d created me. That didn’t make me feel any better, especially considering the fact that as soon as he’d finished saying that he’d done his best to toss me back into whatever primordial soup he claimed to have ladled me out of.

Still, it all just didn’t make sense, not that I was about to tell that to Gash, of all people. I mean, sneaky plots and long-range plans may be a way of life, but what I’d heard from Iskendarian didn’t add up. Even if my worser half had decided to conceal himself from his enemies by going underground behind a false front, or he’d hatched some plot whose resolution had been a century out but for whose resolution he still intended to be on hand, there had to be better ways of running it than this harebrained contrivance.

Of course, given the facts as I knew them, that same harebrain was also me.