Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

What Leen also had on hand, rather to her surprise, were her brother and Shaa’s sister, along with the freshly extracted Tarfon. The surprising part was that for once in all this business someone had decided not to go rushing madly about, but to wait and assess the lie of the land first. Of course, they had had the run of the Archives, too, and no Archivist around to slap their hands.

Leen, realizing futility when she saw it, was also forced to give up on the idea of rounding up every errant browser who sidled away down an aisle or into a side room to check out the Archival materials stored therein. She still felt like finding a reinforced wall and bouncing her head off it repeatedly. The Archives were her responsibility, after all, having been handed over to her care as the successor to the generations of Archivists who had come before, and now she was the first to have betrayed her trust to this grave an extent, external events notwithstanding. There just didn’t seem to be anything more she could do.

The last days had been too much, she realized. She was drifting, in a numb haze, a state that wasn’t helped by the level of Arznaak’s punch she had felt herself. People floated up and wafted away, disconnected pieces of incidents would register while others had obviously slipped past without notice. She wasn’t quite comatose, however. She remembered how the detective fellow - the one who was apparently Byron - had bolstered his claim to that identity by first leading her to the secret computer room, and then by speaking to the display wall in the language Max had haltingly attempted, although pronounced in his mouth fluently and flowingly, followed by the room lighting up around them from the sudden rush of glowing pictures and overlapping blocks of text.

He had gazed at the images with puzzlement, followed by a sudden rush of comprehension. “I don’t know about this,” he’d said, mostly to himself.

“You created all this?” Leen asked. “You know how everything really works?”

“More or less, I’m afraid.”

“Then isn’t there something simple you can do? Some way to send the nasties to Zinarctica or something?”

“It’s an interesting thought,” he’d said. “No, unfortunately things never work that way when you’d like them to. Let me see if I can get a handle on how bad the mess is, and whether I can come up with any mechanisms of action that still might work.”

Then he had sent her away, and in some manner barred the door from within, to the great frustration and consternation of those who had been clustered around the entrance waiting to force their own way down the stairs. Particularly and to no one’s surprise, Max. “Maximillian,” she had told him, “we desperately need to have a talk.” But then the next time she looked he had gone off to work on the defenses, or something, and in any case she was scarcely well-constituted at the moment to discuss anything as serious as her and Max with anyone as slippery as Max, anyway.

It was with some surprise sometime later to walk by the area she had set aside for their dispensary and realize she was seeing new and unfamiliar faces. The one sprawled on the floor with the general pallor and overall ill-used look so many of them bore, she was told, was the Great Karlini, while the reclining fellow arguing with him and quaffing from a foaming mug fresh from the sack of supplies he had dragged down the stairs was known, improbably enough, as the Lion of the Oolvaan Plain. No, the former Lion; fancy that.

What a group.

Their conversation was not without interest, though. “When I find out who is responsible for all this,” the former Lion was saying, “I will slice them up in little ribbons.”

Karlini’s voice was thin but had a tendency to fade even further in spots, and his lolling eyes, when their lids opened, were shot through with red. “Well, let’s see. There’s Arznaak, that’s obvious enough, but it’s clearly a simplification to say the responsibility was his alone. If it weren’t for Max, say, and his ongoing plots and stratagems, Arznaak would have had to do things in an entirely different way; Maximillian gave Arznaak his major opening, shall we say. And then there’s Arznaak’s brother - he could have killed Arznaak when he was little, before any of them knew what a scapula was. That would have saved everybody some trouble, you can bet. Roni - can’t forget Roni. Without her irresponsible experimentation things would have gone so far and no further, right? But as long as we’re talking irresponsible experiments, there’s Byron, or the Creeping Sword or whoever he is - I guess you’d have to say he’s responsible because he helped start the whole system of the gods in the first place.

“And we haven’t even started in on the gods themselves. Gashanatantra with his plots - well, if he hadn’t had the plan to trap Pod Dall in the ring, the wheel would have never gotten rolling, and Arznaak would never have had the essential step up from using the ring’s power to smite Jardin. Jardin, Jill-tang, Vladimir the Storm Lord and his tool Fradjikan - you want me to go on? Can’t forget you, either. If you hadn’t ruined the alliance between us and the Hand we might have been able to head off Arznaak before his master stroke. Right?”

“You mean there’s no one person responsible? Everyone is responsible - including me?”

“Why don’t we just say there’s plenty of blame to go around,” said Karlini.

“I like to have someone to blame,” the Lion said ominously.

Karlini might have shrugged, or it might have been only another spasm. “What can you do? You want somebody to blame? If it’ll make you feel better just pick someone; there’s plenty of suspects around. Why not pick - why not pick him!” And suddenly Karlini was on his feet, his eyes open and glaring, his arms reaching forward like hooks, as ahead of them at the end of the aisle, fresh from his session with his oracle, appeared Byron.

“You!” said the Great Karlini. In an instant, all awareness of whatever he’d been talking about and the people around him and the situation still evolving outside seemed to slip from him, as he came off the floor with his hands clawing up in what was clearly about to be a mad attack aimed at separating me from whatever lives I still possessed. When I had seen him down the aisle after emerging from the computer room I had realized this was not necessarily the smartest thing I could have done, to have confronted him directly without first preparing the ground by dispatching an emissary or making certain he was firmly immobilized, but on the other hand I rather thought facing up to actions to whose responsibility I had fallen heir was an appropriately self-abasing move, in the wake of so much trickery and deception.

Of course, that didn’t mean I had to just sit back and let him take me apart, either, and I did have news that might somewhat mitigate the nastiest of the things he had to hold against me. I opened my mouth to speak, but the sword got there first. “Karlini!” it said, as usual in my mind but also, it was reasonable to suppose, in his as well. And even proceeding directly to the brain as the utterance did, the “sound” of the voice was one that was thoroughly familiar to him.

“What did you say?” Karlini spat. “It wasn’t enough you murdered her, now you have to play games with me as -”

“I’m not dead, dear,” said the sword, at the same moment as I said “She’s not dead, Karlini!” out loud. “Not exactly, at any rate,” the sword added.

Karlini’s mouth moved but no sound came out. Then, “Roni?” he squawked, trying again. “You’re in his sword? What are you doing in there?”

“Taking a vacation,” said the sword.

Karlini, in his agitated state, probably missed it, but to me that remark had sounded less of offhand flippancy than might have been expected. “That’s great!” said Karlini, teetering on his feet again with the look of someone about to fall on his backside on the ground. His voice had the character of someone getting intoxicated as quickly as possible on whatever was available; air, in this case. His eyes were glazing. “That’s great! - all we have to do is build you a new body-”