Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

Why did I even feel like I might know what he was talking about? “But you think things are still that unstable even though the Karlini lab burned itself to ash?”

“Yes and no,” Gash said. “The building didn’t burn itself to ash, now did it?”

I didn’t like where this was leading. My alter ego was the one who’d destroyed the lab, and I was sure he hadn’t done it with an eye toward helping the world. Whatever they’d been working on in that laboratory was not unfamiliar to Iskendarian; the Karlini gang even had his notes on hand with them. Iskendarian had wanted his papers back and at least he hadn’t gotten them - as far as I knew they’d gone to embers along with everything else in the place. But how much could he do on his unaugmented own?

The cautionary comment Gash had applied to Max could stick to Iskendarian as well.

“You never got around to telling me what you want Iskendarian for,” I said, “and what you had to do with waking him up.”

He launched himself promptly into it, apparently happy with the direction I wanted to go. “As I said, I had my suspicions that there was more to you than merely the detective. After our earliest encounters, I began to think. Who could you be, I wondered. I examined the list of likely candidates. I established the metabolic link between us, quite gingerly, you may be sure, and even so you managed to get past the cutouts and deliver me some nasty jolts. But the data that came back up the link were not consistent with a straightforward god-profile. So I passed along Monoch. Monoch is a very old construct, you know. In addition to being a soul-eater, he has experience in handling -”

“Monoch eats souls?”

“Of course. I thought you knew. Can’t you sense it?”

“Monoch hasn’t been out of the cane too much lately. Did you tell him to eat my soul?”

Gash gave me a thin but wary smile. “Shall we say you would clearly be resistant to even a nip, much less a bite? Monoch did, however, finally decide you were someone he had once met. How much do you really know about Iskendarian?”

“Why don’t you tell me what you think I ought to know.”

“Very well. Iskendarian was never a god. He could have been, he just thought it was a waste of his time. He was contemptuous of everyone and everything. He was extremely clever, though. He was so blatant about his ingenuity that it seemed his prime motivation was to show just how indispensable he was, and how menial everyone else looked by comparison.

“Iskendarian did do work with the gods, however. You know about the Spell of Namelessness, for example, and since back then things were somewhat less structured than at present - less ossified, some might say - there was more give-and-take in general. When he dropped from sight it was fully in keeping with the way he’d conducted himself all along - high-handed and unexpected.

“It was thought something had finally blown apart in his face and taken him to pieces with it. Iskendarian was given to riding the edge, after all, and even with all prudent precautions luck eventually runs out. Iskendarian was given more to luck than prudence as a matter of philosophy, too. Still, since he was who he was, he’s been considered missing rather than gone. Now that so many years had passed, though, he had moved out of consideration as a player likely to be ever seen again.

“And then there you were.”

“You mean it suddenly dawned on you that Iskendarian had returned?”

“No...” Gash said slowly. “What I was trying to indicate here is that even after it was apparent that you were someone, it was still a significant surprise to learn that the someone was Iskendarian. Especially when Iskendarian began asserting himself. It was unclear what you... he... were up to.”

“‘Was’ unclear?”

He snorted. “Very well, is unclear. The clear thing, however, as I said before, is the highly destabilizing effect of his reappearance just at this moment.”

“Now come on. Certainly one de-iced guy can’t be worth all this attention.”

Gash was watching me warily. “You really don’t know?”

“What? Has he pulled this trick before?”

“Not this one, no, but others, yes. Iskendarian was known for wanton exercise of power. Indiscriminate experimentation. In the course of refining the Spell of Namelessness he once left all the inhabitants of a small city with no memory and the collective mind of a gopher. The ends of at least a dozen gods were linked to him. Towns were known to vanish from the earth when he was in the vicinity.”

Great, so this was my life. “Is this what you meant when you said he might as well have been a god?”

“The gods have restraint. We know it’s bad policy to foul your own nest.”

“Are you saying Iskendarian was known for being out of his mind? Even by comparison with you nutty gods?”

“That is probably not too strong a statement.”

I kneaded my temples with my hand. How much of this could I believe? After all, Gash was known as the master plotter of the gods. Could he be making all this up? From his reputation, absolutely. But why would he bother? How dangerous was Iskendarian? How dangerous did that make me?

Dangerous enough that I shouldn’t want to be alone with myself in a dark alley, it sounded like. Hell, dangerous enough not to be alone with myself, period. “Sounded like” didn’t even figure into it. I’d seen the evidence with my own eyes.

Except Gash wasn’t telling the truth; not the whole truth at any rate. He never did. So which part was he fudging on? Maybe I could ask Monoch. I’d better wait until I had him alone, though, and could feel him out a bit more. He might lie too, but perhaps I could triangulate on whatever it was they were trying to keep from me by coming at from another direction.

It made sense that Gash might be pulling his punches when illuminating Iskendarian and his activities. If Iskendarian was listening in - and was as touchy as Gash described - maybe Gash didn’t want to rub him the wrong way.

On the other hand, maybe that’s just what he did want to do -

“Are you trying to decide if it’s me listening to you here,” I shot at him, “or if it’s really Iskendarian? You think he might be awake after all and be using his puppet as a mask to hide behind?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Gash said. “Even though Monoch doubts it. Yet Monoch, of course, could have been co-opted.”

I glanced at Monoch, an innocuous walking stick still resting between my knees. Right. I had to keep remembering he was really a spy, and not one working for me, either. “And what have you decided?”

“It appears that you and Iskendarian are now, for certain practical purposes, different entities. Yet I am not convinced he is under your firm control, nor that you will be able to accomplish this.”

“There’s one basic answer to the problem. I could get killed,” I suggested.

“Can you think of anything more likely to wake Iskendarian up again than attempting to die? He may well be several hundred years old already - you think he doesn’t have safeguards? And do you think if Iskendarian could be safely wiped from the scene we gods would not have already brought this to pass? In a notorious manifesto, Iskendarian once declared that the world as we know it would not survive him.”

“Another reason folks were nervous when he dropped from the scene?”

“Just so.”

“But you say they won’t be any happier knowing he’s still around. No, I guess not. Doesn’t sound like a good situation, does it?”

“You begin to perceive the problem.”

“Yeah, right. Wait - how about this? If I can’t get killed, maybe I could kill myself.”

“An interesting twist,” Gash said. “But if you and Iskendarian are indeed separate intelligences, as you claim, don’t you think he would have precautions against you as well?”