Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

The bird was the latest player to be out of its mind - that much was merely empirical evidence - but it plainly wasn’t going to do Max any good to try to cure it, or put it out of its misery, either. The damn thing was squawking at him, too, and you didn’t have to be Haddo and actually be able to hold two-way conversations with the creature to have a pretty good idea what it had in mind. Or how limited your options were if you wanted to do anything else. At least Max had a sword, although he might as well use it to run himself through for all the good it was going to do against Arznaak’s runamok Corpus. Arznaak was too smart to leave the proverbial soft unguarded patch the size of a grapefruit where a single sword-stab could hit a vital ganglion and fell a construct the size of a small mountain.

So what was the vulture’s plan? Wait for the thing to decay on its own and feast on the carrion? Maybe the bird did know carrion when it saw it, but it was not out of the question that under the circumstances it was planning for Max to fill that role himself. The bird was gaining altitude now; it was still swooping around the Corpus’ trunk as the Corpus kept twisting to try to keep it in sight. At least the bird was continually side-slipping out of the way of the Corpus’ vigorous swipes, even if it was waiting for the last second to actually make its escape, and in the process it had succeeded - at least for the moment - in distracting the Corpus from its probable intent of tossing the tower over the bleachers and out of the stadium like a javelin. Of course, the bird might be straining for height merely to get the right angle for lobbing Max into the thing’s mouth. It did not appear particularly likely that the Corpus had a gullet behind its mouth, or indeed anything in the way of internal structure or traditional organs, but then again the bird was crazy. And it was still a bird, after all.

On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be much point in continuing the attempt to lie low. Max didn’t think he could attract any more attention through a use of second-quantum level energies than he’d accumulated already. Arznaak might have been trying to burn out his magical abilities through his power pulse, but if he’d succeeded Max would probably be dead; time to find out how much residual capacity he had left. The toes of the bird were still wrapped firmly around his body, leaving his arms free, so he pointed with one of them at the arm of the Corpus, which happened to be trailing them astern at present, and activated a passive probe. Max felt the probe lock on, and when no retaliatory spell-forms came barreling down the line after him he boosted the gain and added an active interrogator. Diagnostics took shape around him, their level of detail augmented by proximity, revealing the structure of the animatory apparatus keeping the Corpus intact. The Corpus was clever work, with its mass of captive functionaries trapped in a supporting matrix that supplied motive power and the cloak of unity, clever - but apparently decaying. If he could desynchronize the timing of the stabilizer it might pull the finger out of the dike, so to speak...

With the bird squawking its enthusiastic approval, Max began to tinker. It was delicate work, not the sort of stuff you really wanted to be doing while hanging a few hundred feet in the air in the foot of a giant vulture while the object of your puttering tried to bash you into mush, but there it was; he was, after all, supposed to be a professional. It didn’t seem wise to take more than a few seconds to set up the job, either. Max had determined that the Corpus was indeed operating on internal programming at the moment, but there was no telling when Arznaak might come back on line and deploy some of the anti-magic defenses Max had thus far been able to skirt. So - wrap it up and send it off, Max thought, and he yanked loose the originator cord and felt the package slide away.

The giant arm waving after them paused. The head of the Corpus skidded by, looking thoughtful, and then a ragged line of piercing silver sparks ran crossways down its face from its left eyebrow across the bridge of its nose past the corner of its mouth and around the angle of its jaw. More sparks burst loose on its chest, it took one step backward, and then its head and shoulders slumped downward a good twenty feet, like a balloon just getting underway with a solid leak.

That was not, in fact, far from the case. “Enough, already!” Max yelled at the bird. “Get us out of here!”

But instead the bird pulled up in the air, laid its wings back, and dove toward the head of the Corpus, its talons extended toward the thing’s goggling eyes.

“Two can play at this game,” I said. My words were perhaps robbed of their full impact, though, by the fact that my face was being ground into the floor by the chair that had ended up resting on my back with one of my arms wound through its understructure. One of my legs was trailing upward and it felt like my foot had become wedged somehow into the workstation’s desk keyboard surface. Someone was moaning, too, but for a change it wasn’t me; it sounded like a suddenly asthmatic Favored. When the Scapula’s sorcerous tidal wave had hit, it had scrambled me to a fair-thee-well and shot my voluntary muscle control out from under me, but it had slammed into Favored with the impact of multiple hits from a rapid-fire crossbow. He’d gone down in a spasmodic heap and was now huddled under the neural-interface couch.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen or heard anything from Haddo and Wroclaw, either.

I couldn’t admire the Scapula’s methods, or Favored’s either, for whatever contribution to this mess had been his responsibility. Overloading the subcarrier channel through sheer excess was the solution of a brute with power to waste; scorching everyone who was expressing mitochrondial genes for magical latency was downright genocidal. It might be literally genocidal in the case of the nonhuman species, all of whom had the extra magic organelles woven into their cellular ultrastructure more as root constituents than the add-ons more characteristic of magic-capable humans. No, there were more refined ways to pound the world back to its pre-magical days. The genetic code was there to command lysozyme resorption of the magic organelles. For that matter, there was a targeted oncogene, too, and an autoimmune solution one of my associates had launched by retrovirus a few hundred years ago; it should certainly be established in the population by now. And -

- and I realized I was thinking about elegant and subtle ways to launch my own apocalypse that would put the Scapula’s to shame. That shouldn’t be necessary, though, at least to target anyone other than the Scapula himself. Even in that direction it might not be necessary. It might have been my imagination, but I’d thought the Scapula’s pulse was going to keep on building instead of experiencing the abrupt decay and trough that had sucked me back into full awareness. Had my modifications to the Scapula’s Iskendarian virus turned him into a living example of rigor mortis? Had someone else with paralytic intent made it to him first? Was he trying to suck in any counterattacks? Had he just burned out prematurely?

On the other hand, even if it was a question of choosing between subduing the Scapula or leaving him free to rampage again, I didn’t know if I would try to use any of these tools that might be available to me. With the effect of the Scapula’s blow still reverberating through the system who knew what might go awry; I could set loose a chain reaction that wouldn’t stop until it had consumed... well, a lot, if not everything.

Even if the infrastructure wasn’t messed up that could still happen.

But in any case the first thing to do was get my head back on the right side of my feet, and see if the workstation systems had come back enough to tell me what was going on. It was not quite as easy to do as say, however, for not only was my arm wound around the chair, both arm and chair were entwined with the walking stick Monoch, whom I was still wearing slung sidelong down my back. Maybe Favored would finish reviving himself in a timely enough hurry to be able to give me a hand. He was seeming more alive, anyway,even though what I could see of his skin through the chair appeared unnaturally wet and was sporting an unpleasantly greenish slime, and he was bubbling bright red froth through his nose and mouth during his respiration. He seemed to be mumbling, “Gotta change my name, gotta change my name,” too.