Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

Then the decanting cornucopia tilted on its side and began to vibrate - no, Max realized, it wasn’t what he was watching that was shaking, it was him, he was having some sort of a seizure - the storm of stuff wasn’t the only thing Arznaak was sending out, on top of it was something magic, pure magic, a sleet of magic like the noise of a million people shouting at once into his ears -

Max felt his eyes bugging out. His head felt like it was getting ready to explode right off his shoulders from the overload of first and second level harmonics. Violet induction coils lashed through Max’s personal protection field, he knew he was gibbering mindlessly beneath the widespread roar, and as his eyes whipped around most everyone on the platform seemed to be writhing themselves into a frenzy. Had the Scapula deliberately hit them up here with his full force, or was it like this everywhere across the city?

Not far away, a piano plunged from the heavens, plowed into a knot of squirming people, and continued through the floor in a wild clanging clamor of popping strings. A pervasive groaning and creaking and cracking became more apparent. Was the tower finally coming apart altogether?

“All right, already, Arznaak,” Max found himself thinking. “Okay, you’ve won.”

Shaa could detect his brother’s transmission beam; he could almost see it, even.

The rolling of the earth had subsided enough, for a moment, that he thought he might actually be able to reach the beam’s point of origination, a squat camouflaged pillbox sort of thing that had popped itself out of the ground to about knee-high. Then had come the cavalcade of marvels.

It could have been worse. If Shaa had still occupied his location of half-a-minute before he would have been directly on top of one of the geysers gushing precursors and the rest of the grab-bag of stuff; indeed, he himself would either have found himself rendered for his constituents, or dropped whole on some startled housewife or fishmonger as an offering from the gods. He was also under the arc of the fountain, so that virtually all of the baggage descending from the heavens was falling no closer than the inner tier of the stadium, and much appeared to be descending beyond the stadium and perhaps even across the city.

Still, the assault of dry-goods was not the only barrage underway. The paroxysmal energy bloom rolled over him, making it feel like his very hair follicles were crackling with eldritch vigor. For whatever reason, though, it became apparent as he probed the surge field with his suddenly augmented power that he was within something of a shielded lobe; that most of this energy push was following the distribution of the horn of plenty, being directed outward at the spectators in the stadium and the city beyond.

All the more reason to presume his brother was near. Arznaak would naturally guard against some sort of feedback overload. His power surge would be affecting anyone who had any capability for magic - the more powerful you were, the more the potential for traumatic burnout, but there would be folks around the city whose abilities had been only latent who’d suddenly be finding themselves shooting flames out of their fingertips before they fell over in a crisp. He wouldn’t want to fricassee himself, though - it appeared Arznaak wanted to be the only magic user of any ability whatever still left standing when he was done, as well as the only functional god.

But there wasn’t any particular reason his brother should always get his way.

Shaa’s own currently augmented energy stores wouldn’t last forever; might as well use them. He gestured ahead of him. A cloud of force-lines appeared, spun themselves together into a gleaming silver discus, and zoomed off, condensing further and acquiring the sheen of a perfectly reflective mirror, skimming the ground and then pulling up and virtually screeching to a halt -

- directly in line with Arznaak’s scintillating beam, an arm’s-length in front of his pillbox.

Several things happened at more-or-less the same time.

The beam beyond the mirror winked out.

Shaa heard a muffled yet nonetheless familiar voice cry out from under the small pillbox and beneath the ground, followed by a zip-zip-CRACK! sound and a gout of steam from around the beam’s lens-coupling; then the beam died.

Arznaak’s power burst desynchronized and began to rapidly decay. The rain of curry-favor-with-the-masses trinkets began to lessen as well, although who knew how long it would take for the stuff already in flight to finish pattering down.

The Corpus took a look around, momentarily at a loss for words. Then Shaa could see it fix its gaze on the tower at the far end of the field and take a deliberate step in that direction, lowering its arm toward it and opening its fingers as though to grasp the pinnacle for a firm handshake. Well, it had stood to reason that Arznaak would have left his golem with instructions in case communications were abruptly severed. It would be interesting to see how fast the thing began to atrophy.

If, that is, Arznaak was actually out of the picture. Gashanatantra had reached Shaa again, dragging a scorched-looking Jardin. For that matter, Gashanatantra didn’t seem particularly healthy himself. Even this side-lobe radiation must have hit a god’s augmented system with the same roasting fervor as being on the receiving end of a bolt of lightning. “Did you stop the transmission?” Gashanatantra gasped.

“Yes,” Shaa said, “at least for the moment. That would make the next natural step the storming of the hideout.”

“Shouldn’t someone be going out there to fight that thing?” Phlinn Arol said nervously, as the Corpus fixed its gaze again on their position on the top of the tower and headed resolutely in their direction.

“Don’t look at me,” said Max, his voice rubbery, the rest of him still twanging like an elastic band. Was smoke coming out of his ears? But it was looking like high time to do something other than wait around for the Scapula’s next move, though, even if that something was to jump.

“What’s that?” said Leen. She was gazing off behind them and into the night sky above the rim of the stadium.

“What’s -” Max began, wheeling around to see what she was talking about; in his obnoxious armor it was impossible to merely crank his head over to the side for a quick glance. By the time he had gotten his field of view over to see what Leen was goggling at, though, the answer was clear, and not unfamiliar either - a large black shadow against the stars, swelling rapidly, the ragged outline of feathered wingtips, a descending wattled claw, a -

“Hey! -” Max began again, just as it became obvious that the claw was descending straight toward him, and him alone, but before he could get any further the foot slugged him in the chest and his stomach fell out through his toes as the clawed talons snapped shut around his back and dragged him across the tilting floor and - just short of the guardrail- yanked him unceremoniously into the air. “You crazy idiot!-” Max gasped, “what do you think you’re -”

Then the bird leaned over in a tight bank, flinging Max out sideways virtually parallel to the ground, and Max saw between his feet the hand of the Corpus, seemingly half as large as the bird itself, as it mashed its fingers together on the space it had obviously thought the bird would be occupying at that particular moment. From the block-sized foot sliding by far below, too, it was obvious that the bird was not taking their narrow escape to heart, either; quite the contrary, in fact, for it was wrapping itself into an even closer spin around the body of the Corpus. And here was the hand following them, not surprisingly, now trying to bat them out of the sky with the sort of flat-palm swat usually reserved by normal-sized folks for a mosquito.