Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

For some reason, Shaa could not find it in himself to dig him out. So perishes another solemn vow, he mused. Yet in this at least Max had been clearly right; Shaa’s father had had no business demanding such a deathbed oath in the first place. Shaa had been free to acknowledge that it had not been inappropriate for he himself to share the blame. Romantic notions of chivalry totally unreciprocated by their beneficiary had no place in their scurrilous modern world, replete as it was with all manner of chicanery, venality, and downright backstabbing cussedness. But now Arznaak was off the table, oath or no oath, and even if their father had been around to do something about it, even he might have been able to see the consequences that had flowed from his irrational coddling of his eldest son. In any case, it was not worth losing sleep over.

Which meant, of course, that Shaa well knew he had plenty of late nights and bleary-eyed mornings to which to look forward, the rightness of the situation notwithstanding. That would do for later, however - and would also demand that he get on in the meantime with the matter of surviving, in order to have the option of sleepless nights to come. There was still the business of the two members of that small band of god-survivors who happened to be doing their own surviving at the moment in their midst, and were attempting to resolve between them the question of whether their ranks were about to be reduced by yet another one.

Gashanatantra had shaken off the aftereffects of Jurtan Mont as well as a first-timer could typically hope, which meant that even without the upheaval of the earthquake, the ear-boggling collapse of the staircase, and a section of tunnel ceiling just above his head coming down on top of it, he would have been somewhat addled and lethargic for a few moments yet to come. Instead, Shaa observed him to have been simultaneously invigorated by the adrenaline rush and scrambled by the environmental convulsions. At least Gashanatantra had been sufficiently oriented to begin digging his way out, and having been in the shielded lobe at the time of Arznaak’s power pulse he still had the strength to make a good show of it. Of course, having Shaa, Svin, and Jurtan Mont available to shift rocks and earth from the other end had unquestionably been essential to his escape from asphyxiation.

Pod Dall, on the other hand, for all his pointedly menacing remarks to Gashanatantra seconds before, had fared in all regards worse. Whether due to his traumatic recorporation in a body near death (more Arznaak here, without a doubt, from the story highlights Jurtan Mont had hissed to him during the moving of earth), his debilitation from his sojourn in the ring, the effect of Arznaak’s overload pulse, some unrevealed chicanery of Gashanatantra’s (which could scarcely be ruled out), or any number of factors together, he had gone down beneath the cascade of earth and had not budged again. Even after he had been dragged free of the fall by a fortuitously protruding digit, gasping stentoriously, he gave every appearance of being out for a fairly long count.

“Well,” said Gashanatantra, brushing clods of dirt from his hair and staring down at his fallen colleague, “I suppose that’s that.”

“Will you kill him now?” Svin asked.

“No,” Gashanatantra said thoughtfully. “I think there’s been a bit too much of that lately, don’t you?”

“He seemed ready to kill you!,” Jurtan Mont pointed out.

“Yes, well,” said Gashanatantra, “I think he was only having his fun. I could have most likely talked him out of it.”

There was more to it than that, Shaa knew. From the available evidence the two of them might represent a significant proportion of the gods left alive. Depending on just how much damage Arznaak had caused, every last one of them might need to stand together before too long. Shaa noted Gashanatantra now eyeing him, of all people. Shaa cocked a noncommittal eyebrow, which Gashanatantra answered with an almost imperceptible dip of his head. “Whatever the case,” Shaa reiterated, “might I propose exit from this place, before the option is removed utterly from us?”

“This way?” said Svin, his voice echoing back down the tunnel toward them.

“Is it passable?” Shaa called after him.

“So far,” shouted Svin.

“Yes?” Shaa said, now addressing Jurtan Mont, who had assumed his accustomed posture of attentive listening.

“What? Oh, yeah. The tunnel sounds best.”

“Hm,” mused Shaa. “More evidence for a different modality, unmediated by the standard infrastructure.” Jurtan had said he was hearing a heavy overlay of static, but his music sense all told was remarkably unaffected by the disruption to the magical ether. “Let us go, then,” he continued, “while the going is as good as it is likely to get.”

Gashanatantra hefted Pod Dall over his shoulder in what Shaa deemed a reasonable act of camaraderie and they set off down the tunnel, Svin leading the way from somewhere up ahead and Jurtan Mont monitoring whatever extrasensory channels he was prone to frequent. In the event, the tunnel’s condition was not too terrible, meaning that although earth and rock-fall were frequent there was no obstacle that they could not traverse with reasonable alacrity. Sooner than Shaa had expected they had already entered the region of sludge that implied they were close to the exit. He even allowed himself the momentary fantasy that this might in fact be the ending of the whole long business, that all that might remain would be some cleaning up and sorting out, and perhaps a few days off in the sun somewhere.

These pleasant reveries accompanied him through the sludge and the clamber up onto the field, where they passed quickly and firmly into memory, as Shaa had expected of them. As they surveyed the situation, Jurtan Mont came up beside Shaa, cocking his ear.

Through the static, Jurtan thought he was hearing another familiar theme. He squinted off across the field, beyond the mounds of bodies and the lakes of gore and the writhing injured, to the heap of wreckage atop an apparently fresh hill, and the people making their way down it. “Look!” he said, pointing. “In that dark armor, with his head free. Isn’t that Max?”

“This thing has bit the dust,” I said, sliding my chair back from the workstation console. Favored had managed to bypass the cutouts, and in any case no one had ever anticipated a maneuver such as Arznaak had just pulled; his power pulse had fried everything sensitive that was online to any element of the gods’ infrastructure, a category that was bound to include a fair number of brains as well as the burned-out systems in front of me. If it hadn’t cut out when it had, probably because the modified Iskendarian virus had shut Arznaak down from within, there wouldn’t have been a magic user with any more processing power in their head than a rabbit anywhere closer than five hundred miles.

There was still too much noise and static on the modalities I could access directly to punch through to anything with decent information content, or to retrieve any news that might be out there either. Nevertheless, I had the nasty feeling there could be nasty things sprouting all over the place; you don’t spontaneously supercharge everything in sight and assume they’re all going to sit there saying “Ooh! How interesting!” while they wait for the cows to come home. Potions, for example, especially those produced in bulk plants in industrial quantities, had a tendency toward instability even under everyday conditions. They could be blowing their vats sky-high for all we knew down here, or worse - potentially much worse - they could be reacting and recombining and mutating into stuff that would never consent to seeing the inside of a vat again.