Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

“Uh-oh,” said Favored. “I didn’t think he’d do that.”

“Of that sound like do I not,” I heard Haddo mumbling from beyond the glass. No question, I agreed with him.

“What?” I demanded.

“He’s cast loose,” Favored said. “He dropped out of the web.”

“Does that mean -”

Favored looked at me, chewing his lip. “Even if I wanted to, yeah, I don’t know what I could do any more to shut him down.”

“Look at that mob,” said Jurtan Mont. “How we ever going to get in there?”

“Leave that to me,” Pod Dall said.

Did you bring a pry-bar? Jurtan thought. And it was scarcely clear either just what Pod Dall’s goal would be if they did gain access to the overstuffed Stadium of State and its ongoing Knitting. What his goal would be - or whom. Pod Dall had listened to their recounting of current events and the active danger posed by the running-amok Scapula, but had been noncommittal. He had wanted to know about Gashanatantra. It was not clear whether their lack of information on that score had helped them or merely placed them on the list of expendables with no particular reason to live.

Pod Dall had seemed to have something of a soft spot for Dortonn, though, even if it hadn’t been soft enough to help him out when he’d finally keeled over in a dead faint as they’d prepared to leave Vladimir’s lair.

“He is a more hardy fighter than I had expected,” Svin had said, eyeing Dortonn’s body where it had slumped down the stairs from the carpeted dais. “I expected him to fall down hours ago.”

Pod Dall had made them carry Dortonn back up to the longest couch and lay him out there, anyway, and indeed he had still been breathing, although he had not appeared to be any longer for this world than at the outset of the escapade. But Pod Dall’s revenge would clearly not be stayed, so off they had gone.

“Who’s that?” Jurtan said now, his music sense giving him such a symphonic blare of imminent warning that he could barely hear the outside world. It had been mounting as they’d approached the Stadium, but he’d had the feeling that any danger up ahead would pale against the hazard represented by Pod Dall himself if his immediate wishes were thwarted. If this guy was the peacemaker of the gods, Jurtan already knew he’d sure hate to meet whoever planned their fights.

But perhaps he was about to encounter that entity anyway, whatever his feelings in the matter. Svin and Pod Dall followed Jurtan’s pointing finger, up, up, over the rim of the stadium, where the head and shoulders and upraised arms of a ferociously huge human figure were clearly visible, lit from below by torches and spotlights.

Pod Dall’s eyes widened and he began muttering to himself under his breath, mutterings that included more than one discernible reference to the Scapula. It occurred to Jurtan to wonder how much of the mind of the original occupant of Pod Dall’s current body was still hanging around; at the moment he was hearing more than a trace of the music that had accompanied the guy before, on their several meetings. What dealings had the man had with the Scapula, himself?

All told, it was looking like a pretty good time to get out of the vicinity, a time that might not last long, either. Between the giant haranguing the crowd and the nearer half of the city, Pod Dall with his steely-eyed glare, and Svin, who was simultaneously examining the colossus with a professional air, as though looking for critical points of vulnerability, and fingering the edge on his sword, Jurtan was definitely in the company of a crew of maniacs whose lunacy was clearly about to boil over. Then Pod Dall had him by the arm and was marching him resolutely forward. “You,” said Pod Dall, “will listen, then play.”

The manifestation of his brother had taken a few steps in the direction of the Emperor’s tower in the course of its speech, Shaa noted, picking his way through the broken-field rubble left in its wake. That was probably just as well; Shaa wasn’t sure at all he actually wanted to catch up with the thing, or what he would do if he did. Gnaw on its toe? In any case, the Corpus had to be a decoy; it would be quite surprising if Arznaak was actually inside. Parade around in public where he could be a target no one could miss? Not Arznaak, not bloody likely.

But he still had to be close enough to be controlling the thing. To keep leakage and the chance of interception to a minimum he was probably on a tight-link communications setup, which argued in turn (on the grounds of greatest security, if nothing else) for line-of-sight. Now, of course, the thing had a line of sight to most of the city, but before, when it had been aggregating itself out of the assembled Imperial functionaries, that line would have terminated strictly within the stadium walls.

Shaa stopped and squinted around himself again. The dust was still swirling, still rising. With the amount of energy the hypothesized tight-beam would have to be carrying, and the amount of dust it would now be having to push itself through, was it too much to ask for a trail of scintillation?

Here came Gashanatantra now, coughing and rubbing his eyes and splashed to the knees and up to his shoulder with churned mud, fresh from not-quite-skirting a loam-caked hollow where the Corpus had planted its hand on its way to its feet. “Any ideas?” Shaa said to him.

“With this prodigious a waste of power normal rules may not apply,” Gashanatantra yelled back. “What are you looking for up there in the sky?”

Shaa quickly explained. Gashanatantra craned his neck back and joined him in the scan.

Someone new humped their way up the muddy slope, looking in their caked-on and oozing demeanor more large earthworm than humanoid; Jardin. “He is using my power,” Jardin gasped. “He is readying a curse-based spell.”

“Where?” demanded Gashanatantra.

“Where the head was.”

Shaa took off.

“He’s cut off my links to the stuff buried under the stadium field, too,” said Favored. “All the capacitors, the power reservoirs, the precursor vats -”

“To you cross-double is he about,” spat Haddo.

“There’s no way he could -” Favored began, wheeling on Haddo.

“Iskendarian,” I said. “How much of the Iskendarian virus had infiltrated the Scapula before he dropped off the net?”

“I’m not sure what I was looking for,” Favored said reluctantly. “Some, I guess.”

“Do you know how to do a display rollback?” I said. “Here, look, like this - now what was your access sequence for that screen? Okay.” The old status screen on the Scapula’s thrall-network came back, I fine-tuned the sieve, and - there were signature traces of the Iskendarian infection wherever I looked. There - in the Scapula, too. And here I’d never even thought about network-wide contagion - I must have been doing something right when I’d designed that virus-thing. But how long did the Scapula have left before he realized he had to fight Iskendarian? Or for that matter, how long before Iskendarian was in control?

Now, I knew I must have put some kind of safeguards in the Iskendarian code. Hmm - I wondered if the Scapula had found out anything about the privileged subcarrier channel. How much did Favored know? - that might give me a clue. “Where did you stick the communications module?” I asked him.

I let him pick an option from one of his coded dialog screens and the second quantum level trunk status display popped up. Activity across the net was lower than I’d ever seen it - not surprisingly, considering that most of the high-volume transmitters had melted down and any remaining others were wisely lying low. And the subcarrier burst bands, that the magical nanoeffectors used to talk to each other themselves?