Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

“Favored!” I said.

One eye cracked open and swam blearily in my direction, completely injected with red. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he gurgled.

He wasn’t going to be of much use, that was clear. I didn’t want to try any sort of conjuration, either, even though I still felt tingly and invigorated from the Scapula’s rapid-grow treatment, since on the one hand I didn’t know what eddy loops and feedback circuits might be left in the system, either inadvertently or as deliberate mop-up weapons planned by Arznaak, and on the other hand I hadn’t really shaken my anti-magic bent, whether it had been inculcated in me by Iskendarian or not. I thought it was past time to be trying things just to see what might happen.

There was a scrabbling sound behind the viewing-gallery window and a greenish clawing hand rose into view, followed by the sagging face of Wroclaw. If I kept craning my neck around to see what was going on while my nose and cheek still remained in intimate contact with the floor, though, I might end up frozen in an even more unnatural position with no one but myself to blame for the crowning touch. I tried again to lever myself up from the floor with my free hand, simultaneously using my elevated leg as a pivot point to roll over to the side and tip the chair away from my back. This time I yanked with my entwined arm too, and between everything the chair slid free and crashed over onto the floor.

“Ow!” said the wincing Favored, covering his ear with his arm.

“Who was that?” I said.

“That was me,” muttered Favored. “I was -”

“No, I thought I heard somebody new trying to clear their throat, or maybe just making one of those rattly noises down in their chest. There it is again.”

A limp blackish dishrag had joined the wilted Wroclaw at the viewing window, but it hadn’t seemed like the kind of sound Haddo would make, anyway.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Favored was saying, with surprising sharpness for all his woebegone appearance.

“Shut up and let me listen,” I told him. I had gotten my leg free, too, in the process of relieving myself of the chair, and was sitting up on the floor with my back to the main console while I tried to get my bearings. But now I thought someone was saying, faintly and in a creaky voice, “Where am I and what am I doing here?”

“Anybody hear anything that time?” I said.

They all shook their heads, no. Was Iskendarian back? That was clearly the fear in Wroclaw’s saggy-lidded eyes, at least, and with the shower of prodigies abroad in the land right at the moment the prospect could not be thoroughly discounted. But I -

Then I realized this voice was not the only new message impinging on my senses. There was a band of heat running diagonally down my back, heat accompanied by a tingling thrumming quiver, all these sensations coinciding with the position Monoch in his walking stick form currently occupied. I reached up and back and pulled him loose.

“What am I doing here?” said Monoch, now coming through much more clearly as I grasped his handgrip. “Where am I?” But - leaving aside for a moment the fact that the sword had never actually spoken before - that voice certainly didn’t sound like any voice I’d have thought Monoch would use. It didn’t sound like the voice of a sword at all; it was altogether too pleasant, that and too thoroughly female, too. It was also quite possibly a voice that was not exactly unfamiliar to me. In fact, it sounded like -

“Damn it,” she said, “I’m in a sword! What am I doing in a sword?”

Gash had told me Monoch was a soul-drinker; he must have sucked her in while I was distracted and Byron and Iskendarian were playing out their struggle for control of our body. Now the Scapula’s power surge had given enough of a jolt to let her emerge into consciousness.

“It’s sort of a long story,” I said, “and I doubt you’re going to like it very much.”

“To who talking you are?” creaked Haddo.

“Your late boss,” I told him, “Ronibet Karlini.”

“What was that?” said Tildamire Mont, flat on her back on the street, watching a few final blue sparks, the remnants of the brief tempest that had suddenly engulfed them, trickle off the tip of her nose and wiggle their ways footward along her body. Another small squid dropped out of the sky and draped its slimy mantle across her ankle. Next to her and still on his feet, her father batted another falling something-or-other out of the way with the flat of his sword. “Karlini?” She raised herself up and looked around for him.

Karlini was sprawled on the ground too, but he was unconscious again. Even with the sickly yellow cast of his exposed skin and the even brighter yellow in the white of his lolling eye, which she pulled back his eyelid to view in the light of the lantern, he still seemed happier to be rid of his sense than he had all day being awake. Whatever had just transpired surely had nothing direct to do with them; it would be as well to let him sleep -

“What’s that?” the Lion said sharply.

Deep in the wreckage they were guarding, a pearly glow was seeping up out of the ground, enough of a glow to cast shadows upward amidst the remaining scorched beams. The light was shifting and waving, as though shining through a pool of rippling water, and the ground appeared to be... bubbling.

Tildamire yanked Karlini forward by the shoulders and began shaking him vigorously. “Karlini!” she yelled in his ear. “You better wake up and see this!”

“Allow me,” said Gashanatantra, and with a wave of his hand the ground in front of them exploded into the air in a shower of churned mud and pulverized stone. Picturesque, thought Shaa as the mud glopped down around and on top of them, but the stroke for all its lack of moderation had been efficacious, for revealed before them, sunken into the earth with its hardened ceiling now peeled back in a large jagged hole, was what apparently had been his brother’s hideout. Arznaak, however, was not personally in evidence.

With the volume of mud still slumping into the small pillbox, though, Arznaak could easily be swimming about beneath the surface. On the other hand, if the backlash from the severing of Arznaak’s transmission link with the Corpus had been harsh enough he could be unconscious somewhere in the gloop, too, breathing the stuff - with terminal implications - into his lungs. Of course, Arznaak might no longer be anywhere in the vicinity; there must undoubtedly be an exit from the facility which he could have taken, conscious or not. Arranging for conveyance in the midst of adversity was characteristic of solid planning.

Given that Arznaak was still being as undetectable to Shaa’s tentative probe as he had proved himself earlier, the manner of resolution for any of these possibilities was the same. A morose expression on his face, Shaa swung himself over the edge and slid feet-first into the bog.

The slime moved up his legs and past his waist before stopping halfway up his chest when his soles finally encountered solid floor. The chamber was small, perhaps ten feet on a side, and square, and the surface of the mud was showing no indication of someone breast-stroking about beneath it. Moving as quickly as possible across the floor, which considering the adhesive effect of the sludge was not quickly at all, Shaa encountered first (amidst the more solid clumps of dirt within the mud and the rubble from the traumatically ruptured roof) an overturned and splintered chair, and finally, set into the far wall with the curve of its top edge barely peeping above the mud, an exit hatch, closed and dogged and tingling to the touch with guardian energies.

“Did you find the body?” Gashanatantra shouted down at him from his perch on the ground above.