Spell of Catastrophe By Mayer Alan Brenner

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Spell of Catastrophe

Mayer Alan Brenner

Published: 1989

Categorie(s): Fiction, Fantasy

Source: http://www.mayerbrenner.com/ Also available on Feedbooks Brenner:

- Spell of Apocalypse (1994)

- Spell of Intrigue (1990)

- Spell of Fate (1992)

Copyright: Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country.

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Copyright Notice

© 1986-2007 by Mayer Alan Brenner. First published by DAW Books, New York, NY, July, 1989. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivs 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 or write to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, U.S.A.

Chapter 1 MAX ON THE ROAD

THE AIR WAS THICK and the heat oppressive. Outside the flap of canvas that covered the doorway, a vast range of beige desert overlaid by a scattering of scrub ran to the horizon. The line of dust raised by the approach of the caravan hung motionless in the air, stretching south from the oasis into a cluster of low hills. Max dropped the flap, turned, and descended the short flight of steps, his eyes still smarting from the desert sun. Each stair had the solidity of rough board, reassuring after the sands of the past few days, except for the bottom one, which yielded under Max’s foot in a very unstairlike fashion. He rocked back and squinted down. The stair shifted in the gloom and became a man dressed in loose dark clothes sprawled out on the floor, burbling pleasantly from somewhere in a comprehensive stupor. By the look of him, he might be burbling still when the caravan passed through the next time, heading south again at the end of its run. That probably meant the local rotgut was either very tasty or very dangerous. Max stepped across the man and proceeded across the room.

At the other end of the room was a bar, on which Max rested an elbow. The room itself occupied a natural gully in the rock next to the oasis, covered over with a heavy canvas tent. Cables ran from eyebolts driven into the rocks up to timbers that supported the canvas roof.

Another caravan had been parked at the oasis when Max had arrived, but most of its crew had not been in evidence. They were certainly missing no longer. Gently reeling forms were propped in chairs and on tables, and piled in low mounds on the rock floor. An arm wrestling match was in process at one side, deep in the shifting green haze from a half-dozen guttering candles. The bartender emerged from a shadow behind the counter and pushed a mug at Max. "You know any good ruins around here?" Max said to him. A hefty growl from the other end of the bar drowned out any reply. The man behind the growl, Max discovered as he turned to eye him, was about seven feet tall, and waving a trestle table over his head with one massively corded arm. "You want another drink?" Max said. "I'll buy you another drink."

The guy growled and hefted the table. "Okay," Max said, "no drink." It was just as well, as the bartender had managed to conveniently disappear from sight. Behind the counter, framed by several large boulders, was a cave containing stacks of large kegs. The upper lip of the cave formed a narrow ledge overhead. Dangling in front of the ledge over the bar was a line of additional kegs, lashed together in threes and suspended by cables from pulleys. The cables ran down to a rack of marlinspikes in the rock at the end of the bar, just on the other side of the counter from Max, in fact. The giant swung the table again and took a bead on Max.

"Don't be ridiculous," Max said. "It's too hot for this kind of nonsense." The man reared up with the table. "All right, then," said Max, "have it your way." Max leaned over the counter, selected one cable, grasped it firmly with his right hand, and sharply cocked his right wrist. A blade sprung out of his sleeve below his palm and slashed the rope. Max rose swiftly into the air as the trio of lashed kegs at the other end of the bar equally swiftly descended. The kegs struck the waving table, the table overbalanced as its wielder lost his grip, and with one loud thud and a trio of lesser thuds the table hit the giant's head and the kegs again hit the table. All collapsed in a clatter and small cloud of dust.

A final two shards fell to the floor, there was a moment of silence, and then the unmistakable sound of a contented snore arose from deep within the heap.

Max swung from the rope onto the ledge over the bar and seated himself. He sipped at his drink, which he had retained in his left hand, and slid the knife back into its spring-loaded sheath. "Fortunately for you," he said down at the pile of wreckage, "it is far too hellish out here to get involved in serious exertion." After another week at the outside the caravan would be clear of the desert, he thought, and then it was a straight shot across the plains to Drest Klaaver, where at last report Shaa was hiding out. He was looking forward to seeing Shaa again. If Shaa didn’t try to kill him on sight, that is.

The bartender had reemerged from his hiding-place. "So what about the ruins?" Max called down.

"Ruins?" the man said, looking out at the room. "Whaddaya need more ruins, what you did here isn't enough for you?"

FOR A CHANGE, Max was not actually on the run, which is to say that he didn't think anyone in particular was after him. Of course, his perception (which happened to be wrong) did not materially change the situation. He did indeed have a pursuer, and later that night the pursuer caught up.

The large moon was up, too, along with some of the small fast ones. Max dangled his legs over the tailboard of the rear wagon, watching ground pass in the pale light. A large shaggy form loped around the wagon and hoisted itself next to him. "I still say you should have hacked him into little pieces," the shaggy hulk said. "If you could have waited for me, I would have hacked him into little pieces."

"All the time with you, Svin, it's fight, fight, fight, hack, hack, hack," Max said. "I'm not going to say your philosophy may not be superior, and it certainly has the virtue of simplicity, but by the same token -"

"It is the course of honor, the only true path for a warrior born," Svin said with a note of finality.

"That's fine as far as it goes," Max said, "but not all of us are warriors born. Some of us subscribe to the possibility of old age instead."

Svin thought that over. Shadows passed over the large moon - three circling dwarf buzzards, moonlight shimmering on their feathers. The smallest one swooped down to have a look at them, its ten-foot wingspan draping a darker black over the rocks. "Look at that thing," Max said, waving his hand at it. "It's got a body to feed, but it manages fine without a lot of hacking and slashing. I don't know how much of a goal in life those things have, but they seem to get by pretty well on a more passive lifestyle."

"Where do you think it finds enough to eat?" Svin, perhaps because of a Northern metabolism honed in the icy wastes, was perpetually hungry.

"There's always carrion around somewhere, if you know where to look for it and you’re willing to do what you’ve got to do."

Svin shook his head. "Carrion, Max, is for lesser beings. We will die in battle, as a man should, and go triumphant to meet the gods."

Max, who had met some of the gods, had not been impressed. "Watch out for remarks like that, Svin, you never know who's listening."

"Fah!" Svin said. "What does it matter if -" Max heard a muffled 'clunk' next to him. Svin began to raise one hand to his head, then fell over backward into the cart. A heavily thatched arrow with a flat blunt head dropped into his lap. Max pushed off the tailgate and landed silently behind a rock. The wagons began to clatter and jangle away down the path.

A low voice buried in a reedy gargle came from the same direction as the arrow. "Honor have addressing I Maximillian, Vaguely Disreputable?"

Max raised himself slightly and squinted over the rock.

Back there in the gloom, he thought he could make out two glowing orange sparks, spaced at the right separation for eyes. "… You're Haddo," he said.

"Haddo am I. Serve I Great Karlini. You come?"

Karlini? "Yes, I'll come," Max said. "Of course I'll come. Just let me get my stuff." He got up and sprinted after the wagons.

Svin was breathing, and a large lump was forming on his forehead not far above his nose. Max shook him, without noticeable effect, then rolled him into a more secure position deeper inside the wagon. Shaking his own head, Max found his two packs, slipped the larger one onto his back, and jumped to the ground. The caravan moved away behind him. The pair of orange eyes approached.

"You were a little rough on poor Svin back there," Max said, handing Haddo his arrow.

"Situation's nature was unsure I."

"Yes, well, I suppose they don't make barbarians like they used to, either."

"Considerate you are," Haddo said, indicating the arrow, which then disappeared inside a sleeve. The glowing orange spots (which Max assumed were eyes, for want of a better explanation) floated in the opening of a hooded black cloak. The moonlight failed to penetrate the opening, and in fact seemed to make little impression on the surface of the cloak either. "Thanks give I."

Haddo glided off into the desert to the west. Max followed. "Nice bit of shooting, though, Haddo."

"In practice, I."

" … So how is everything, Haddo?"

"Problems. Always are problems."

" … Are you going to tell me what's up, or do I have to wiggle your tongue myself?"

"To wiggle, first must find," said the featureless black hood. "Karlini will tell."

"Where is Karlini?"

"Days by foot. Trackless are wastes."

Max sighed. More time stomping through the desert. "In the old days, they had machines, Haddo, machines that could have -"

"Old days gone. Matter not. Still now, things not bad."

"I wouldn't exactly call walking for days through trackless wastes 'not bad'."

Haddo sounded smug. "Said I only distance by foot. Did not say by foot we go. Brought I bird."

THEY REACHED THE BIRD before dawn. Max and Haddo climbed yet another hard-packed rise in the false light, watching for more of the thorny succulents that had already snagged the strap off the pack Max was toting in his hand. At the bottom of the down slope below the rise was a dark rounded sand dune. Haddo scampered down the slope and whistled a low trilling whistle. The dune stirred and rose. It was the bird.

Only major cities and other big-time operators usually kept the big buzzards, which might mean that Karlini had come up substantially in life since Max had seen him last. The buzzards ate a lot, but not being especially concerned about their menus, each one could serve quite adequately as a refuse disposal department for a metropolitan area. Among the species of giant birds, they were also about the dumbest. No one needed much intelligence from a bird, of course, but it was helpful if the bird had the attention span to remember what it was doing through to the end of its current task. The buzzards were particularly notorious for getting distracted during official state visits or large pageants and unexpectedly taking off for their ancestral breeding grounds, often bearing with them several surprised dignitaries. Farthrax the Munificent had been crowned Emperor, in fact, after returning, the better part of a year later, from the mountains where the breeding took place. He had always refused to talk about it, but the general amazement over his return was enough to cement him as a favorite of the gods.

"Is this thing safe?" Max said.

"Through trackless wastes rather walk you?" Haddo said.

He resumed whispering in the bird's ear slit. Max grabbed a dangling rope and climbed aboard. Haddo scratched behind a feather, patted the bird on the side of the head, and came back. Max helped him swing into the saddle in front of him, forward on the body between the wing roots. The bird stood, hopped up and down tentatively a few times, flared its neck feathers, and flopped down again.

"Nothing say you," Haddo muttered. He screeched at the bird. The bird screeched back, then lurched to its feet. Max checked the belt holding him in the saddle. The buzzard fanned its wings, broke into a run, strode up the ridge, and hopped into the air.

The sun rose as the bird circled, gliding and gradually gaining altitude. Thermals and whirling dust devils sprouted from the desert floor. The bird began to move in earnest, gaining speed with precise flicks of its wingtips, spiraling up one thermal and launching itself across the desert to the next.

Around noon a line of craggy hills appeared in the northwest, and later in the afternoon the hills were rolling in a picturesque but jagged scroll beneath the broad wings. The hills were as barren as the desert, but the exposed rocks displayed colorful strata of red and purple and bright yellow. The shadows lengthened and the colors of the rock had begun to glow with deeper hues when Max suddenly thought he smelled damp salt. "Haddo," Max said.

"Not to bother," Haddo snapped. "Landing procedure complex is." A salt lake grew underneath, tucked into the folds of the hills, silent and smooth in the still air. The buzzard banked around a peak and headed for an island. The island was covered with buildings - no, a castle.

Then Max took a closer look. The castle was not on an island, the castle was the island. Walls and towers dropped smoothly into the lake and the upper part of one ring of crenellations protruded from the water like a reef of stepping stones, the top of each rectangular block barely awash. The bird circled once around the central cluster of towers, gauging the air currents, abruptly nosed over, and dived. It pulled up just above a flagpole, sideslipped onto a walled field, ran a few steps, and settled to the ground.

Max helped Haddo down and followed him to the front of the bird, feeling like the flagstones of the courtyard were executing sharp banks beneath his feet. Haddo whistled something at the bird, letting Max scratch under its neck. After a moment, Max gingerly straightened. "Okay, Haddo," he said. "Thanks for the flight. Now what about Karlini?"

Haddo gave a final remark to the bird. "Here wait," he said to Max, and staggered off through a doorway. Someone passed him coming out, the someone wrinkling his nose fastidiously.

"Wroclaw!" Max said. "Nice to see you again."

"Very good to see you, sir." Wroclaw' s gaunt skin was an olive-drab green, and his bones were of not quite human proportions. His ancestors had been conjured, one way or another, but that wasn't something usually discussed in polite company. "Are you fit, sir?"

"That remains to be seen. I suspect it depends on what Karlini wants out of me."

Wroclaw coughed discretely. "Very good, sir. Will you see the master now?"

"I hope so, Wroclaw, I really do."

"Ahem, yes," Wroclaw said, "sir. Will you follow me, please?" Crossing the doorway, Max's hair crackled with static and he caught a whiff of ozone. Inside the corridor, though, the air was much cooler and the tang of salt was much less apparent.

"Do you know what I'm doing here, Wroclaw?" Max said.

Wroclaw rounded a corner and came to a stop at the entrance to a cramped circular staircase. "Any idea I might possess," Wroclaw said, "would undoubtedly be less than the complete truth. The master is, as always, the best person with whom to raise the matter."

A raven cawed faintly seven times, somewhere off in another wing. "Oh, goodness," Wroclaw said. "Time for dinner already. Please wait here, sir, the master will be along shortly. Alas, I find myself also serving as the cook."

"Very well, Wroclaw." Max leaned on a stone windowsill across the staircase and watched shadows creep up the hills. One hill had gone into total eclipse by the time a figure bounded down the stairs toward him, running one hand through its hair. "The Great Karlini, I presume," Max said, "and if you don't tell me what's up very quickly I'll turn you into a carp and eat you, raw.”

"Oh, good, Max, it is you," said the Great Karlini, pushing hair out of his eyes. "Haddo is certainly faithful, but his eyesight isn't quite perfect and we're never too sure what he'll bring back."

"That robe needs to be washed."

Karlini looked down and started, apparently noticing the cluster of fresh stains for the first time. "Good old Max," he said. "How do I manage without you?"

"That depends on what you've gotten yourself into this time."

Karlini dropped an arm across Max's shoulders and led him down the stairs. "So, Max, how have you been?"

Max stopped. "That's it," he said. "I'm out of here. See you later."

"Max, now don't -"

Max crossed his arms. "Look, Karlini, you get me dragged all the way out here, ruining a perfectly good if somewhat arid caravan trip, and then you won’t tell me why. Haddo won't talk, Wroclaw won't talk, you won't talk. You know what that says to me? What that says to me is that you want me to do something that probably involves human sacrifice, and I bet we both know who's the relevant human."

Karlini sat down next to him on the stair. "Don't glower at me like that, Max. It's not that bad, but it is a long story. Actually, it's not that long a story, but it's sort of -”

"Karlini."

"All right, all right. You noticed the castle?"

"Yeah, sure. Looks like a nice place."

"Well … it's okay."

"So, what's wrong with it? It have rats? Things?"

"It's not what it has," Karlini said, "it's what it does. It moves."

"Moves."

"Not like earthquakes, I mean, or settling ground. I mean you wake up in the morning and the whole castle’s jumped somewhere else. It's been here for almost two weeks, but before that, it was bounce, bounce, bounce. Just enough time to get an idea where we are, and then, poof!, another hemisphere. Last month we spent six days somewhere around the North Pole. We almost froze. I'm just waiting for this thing to head for the open ocean."

"I assume we'll get to the real point when you tell me why you can't get rid of the place. You got a problem with the landlord?"

Karlini looked suspiciously at Max. "You sure you haven't heard about this before?" Max shook his head, no. Karlini sighed. "Well, that's the problem, all right. It won't let me get rid of it. I can't even walk out the door.”

Chapter 2 THE CREEPING SWORD

AT THE SAME TIME Haddo was flying Max toward Karlini's castle I was sitting at my desk minding my own business, the major thought on my mind being whether I'd be able to afford to eat after the day after tomorrow. There was no way I would have known about Max and Haddo at that point, of course, but I wouldn't have cared anyway since I'd never heard of Haddo or Max or Karlini. Food was the issue, and realizing it was already past the middle of the day and I hadn't had a customer in a week, and wondering how hungry I'd have to get before I'd be walking the streets looking for odd jobs and manual labor. Then someone knocked on the door. I put the half-drained flask I had been nursing in a drawer and said, "Come in.”

A woman came in. "My husband has been kidnapped," she said, and that meant all of a sudden things were looking up.

Her husband had a large warehouse on the docks and a fleet of barges on the river. He hadn't come home the previous night. According to her, he had always come home before. A note had appeared under the door in the morning. She passed it over to me.

Payment of 20,000 gold zalous will cause the return of Edrik Skargool. He is not hurt, yet search will cause death. More instructions will forthcome.

The Creeping Sword

"Huh," I said. The style was stilted, making me think of someone who was trying to sound educated without the benefit of actually having an education. On the other hand, the words were spelled right and the penmanship was neat. Still, I didn't have to look too closely to find the major unusual detail. The medium was a sheet of burnished copper, and the words had apparently been etched into it with fire.

"Do you have any idea who this Creeping Sword is?" I asked.

"Certainly not, of course not," she said. "That is your job, isn't it?"

I made a noncommittal sort of hrrumphy sound and let her start talking again. She had gone to the police, such as they were. With the current political situation, the police weren't about to investigate anything, unless the order came as a command from the Guard. So she’d gone to the Guard. The Guard was having too much fun enforcing martial law to worry about another kidnapping. The only kidnappings they were interested in were the ones they were doing themselves. I hoped for Skargool’s sake they weren’t the ones who had picked him up. I wasn't about to fight the Guard for him, even if she paid me a lot, and I didn't think anyone else would be prepared to either. "Will you find him?" she asked.

"I’ll do my best," I said, "under the circumstances. That's my job."

She made an unhappy face at me. Sometimes that was a good tactic - I'm a man, and like any man I’ll turn gooey under the right circumstances - but it wasn't going to work on me this time. I already didn’t like her. "If I pay you good money and give you my trust," she said, "I would expect that you would at least be willing to guarantee -"

I had been leaning back in my chair. Now I let the chair fall forward so the two front legs hit the beam floor with a sharp "thud", and pointed a finger at her for further emphasis. "Look, lady," I said. "Roosing Oolvaya is a big city. There must be fifty thousand people here. Any day of the week a bunch of them disappear and never get found. Now we’re sitting with a dead Venerance, the son who probably knocked him off is in charge, and mercenaries are running around the streets giving orders to the rest of the normal Guard. You think the mess out there doesn't make the usual mess worse? Well, it does, lady, a lot worse. People are getting rounded up, people are getting executed, and people are getting kicked into the sewers just for being in the wrong place. Not criminals, not only political folks, just people, you understand that? In this kind of situation, a lot of old grudges find themselves getting settled, a lot of nastiness pops up. It's rough out there."

"But." she said, still pouting, "but what should I do, then?"

"If you hire me, I'll find your husband if he's findable. Are you hiring me?"

"Yes, yes, of course I am, even if -”

“Then get ready to pay this Sword person."

"But 20,000 zalous! How could I -"

"I’ll get you the money back if I can."

"But can't you bargain with -"

"You might reflect," I said, "on the fact that money can generally take more wear and tear than husbands can."

She shut up. I asked questions, but none of the answers were helpful. She didn’t know of any disgruntled employees. The list of business enemies was short; she said her husband had a reputation as a straight dealer. They had no children.

"Who gets everything if he dies?" I said.

"Why, I'm not sure. I really don't know."

I had yelled down for a messenger earlier, after the scent of work had floated in with her, and the messenger now returned with Turbot. Turbot was in more-or-less the same line of work as me, whatever that was, and we used each other as backup man when things were happening. He was glad to have something to do that might pay, at least as glad as me. As the wife was leaving in Turbot's custody she paused and looked back.

"Will you find him?" she repeated.

"Yeah, I'll find him," I said. I strapped on my sword and headed for the man’s warehouse.

SKARGOOL CARGO WAS A HULKING TWO-STORY BUILDING with heavy timber walls attached to its own wharf. The manager was a hulking man named Kardu Chog. He wasn't attached to a wharf, but one finger was brandishing a ring with a stone the size of a rowboat.

"Me, I was first mate on the first barge Skargool ever sailed," Chog said expansively around a cylinder that looked like a cigar but smelled a lot more like a swamp after a range fire. Tobacco leaves were one of the things Skargool imported, shipped up the river from the south. "First mate, aye, and crew too. The two of us, like brothers." He waved at the humidor on his desk, offered me a cigar. I shook my head. He shrugged and took a massive pull on his own, a line of solid ash advancing toward his mouth. "Skargool and me, we go way back.”

"What about his wife?" I said.

"What do you mean," he said slowly, "about his wife?"

"His wife. How long does she go back?"

Chog leaned back in his chair and squinted up through the smoke. "Mind you now, I don't really know her, but she's been around now for, oh, five years, six. Why are you interested?"

"Just asking questions," I said. "Part of the job." I poked around, checking in with the workmen.

From all accounts, Edrik Skargool was indeed that rare thing, a rich boss well liked by his employees. Another relevant fact also came to light: Skargool walked home daily, along the same route.

I left the warehouse, crossed the street, and entered the dive on the other side; step out on any street around the wharves and there was bound to be a bar within arm's reach. When my drink came I laid an ool next to it. "The Skargool place," I said.

"Yeah?" said the bartender.

"Anybody seem interested in it?" I spun another ool in the air.

The bartender licked his lip and thought, then shook his head sadly, eying the ool on the counter. I pushed it toward him. "Let me know," I said, and told him how to find me.

I worked my way along. From the feel of the kidnap note this thing had been a job worked out in advance, not a bit of random work popped on the spur of the moment. The Creeping Sword, whoever or whatever he was or they were, would have hung around getting a handle on Skargool's movements, and might even still be keeping an eye on things. Maybe somebody had noticed something. It wasn’t a real good bet - the waterfront was always filled with transients, and with the number of out-of-town fighters bolstering the Guard things were bound to be worse, but maybe one of the regulars had an eye open. 1f nothing else, the Creeping Sword might hear I was asking questions and go after me. Coming out of the fourth bar I felt a bump and tug at my side. Attached to the touch was an arm. I grabbed it as the kid tried to twist away. He was somebody I knew.

"How's business, Glinko?" I said.

Glinko looked around at me and turned white. "It’s you," he said.

I shook him up and down a few times. "Yeah, Glinko, it's me," I said. "You’re losing your touch. You’re also turning into an idiot."

"I didn’t know it was you," he said plaintively.

"Save it. Just as well you’re here. Maybe you can do something for me."

A look of calculation appeared. I shook him again, then opened my hand and dropped him. The street was muddy. The streets were always muddy. "You didn’t have to do that," he said.

"You didn’t have to try to pick my purse, either. Fortunately for you, I generally take the long view." I showed him an ool out of Skargool’s wife’s advance.

Glinko stopped trying to clean himself off. The coin interested him. Coins always interested him. Coins interest most of us. "Who cares about mud anyway?" he said. "What do you need?”

"The Creeping Sword," I said.

"The who?"

"That’s what I want to know. This Sword kidnapped a businessman."

"Skargool?" Glinko said.

"Yeah," I said, "that’s right. Tell me about it."

"You going to give me that?" he said, meaning the ool.

"You going to give me a reason to?"

He glanced around the street, then slipped around the corner of the bar into a narrow alley. The street had only been about three times the width of the alley, but except for us the alley was empty. "I know Skargool," Glinko said in a low voice, "I know most of the guys down here. That’s what I do, I keep an eye out." Glinko was a spotter for one of the thief-gangs. "Skargool’s a right guy, pays good, he’s good to the workers, you know? Half the guys around want to work for him. Then a couple of weeks ago a lot of bad talk started. A ship of his was late, see, and all of a sudden there’s talk like Skargool might have sold the crew to the slavers. That’s how it started. Last I saw him was two days ago. He was walking home. He didn’t look good. He looked real depressed. Now today he’s missing, it’s all around the street."

"Okay." I gave him the ool. He said he'd nose around for me and check in later. He went back to the street, and I slipped out the other end of the alley.

I tried a few more bars without much more luck and ended up at the Grumpy Gullet. Civil unrest or no, Slipron was there, at his usual table in the back. I handed him the kidnap note Skargool's wife had given me.

Slipron screwed a lens into one eye, Oolvayan glass in a bone housing, and scrutinized the engraving, rubbing the copper plate between two fingers. Then he tapped the plate with a fingernail and swiveled the lens up at me. "It's worthless, of course, excepting perhaps only the metal itself."

Slipron being the best fence in Roosing Oolvaya, his comment meant he could move the thing for a profit and was willing to bargain, but selling it was not what I had in mind at the moment. I told him so.

"Ah," Slipron said. "Well. This engraving is not professional work." He rested a finger across the inscribed wards and closed his eyes. The letters around his finger swam briefly. He brought the plate up to his face and sniffed. "A firepen. Definitely a firepen."

The tapster was passing with a tray of foaming mugs, and I snagged a full one for Slipron. He handed me back the ransom note. "I know of Edrik Skargool, and I consider him a good man," Slipron said. "I also note the line of this letter that reads 'Search will cause death'."

"I figure they’re talking about search by sorcery," I said. If an anti-search spell had been set up around Skargool, any finder probe keyed to him would set up feedback in the protector field, feedback that might be enough to fry him. Whether the Creeping Sword had the facility or the money to get a spell like that was another matter. I thought it was a bluff. Even if it was a bluff and a sorcerous search might find Skargool, hiring a magician to run a decent search would cost a lot more than my own time. If it wasn’t a bluff, and the magician wasn’t good enough to avoid or neutralize the no-search field, that would be it for Skargool.

Of course, I wouldn’t hire a magician. I wouldn’t even go near magic unless it grabbed me by the neck and forced my nose into it. Magic is more trouble than it’s worth. It messes up everybody’s life. It had messed up my own life enough in the past to give me more of an education than I'd ever wanted. No, all this case needed was legwork, and legwork I know.

Slipron said. "What if they don’t care what kind of search it is, and they Sword people spot you looking for him?"

"Give me a little credit," I said. "This is my job, and I know what I'm doing. I know how to be careful."

Slipron looked doubtful. A chair scraped next to us, and a gust of garlic announced the arrival of Gag the Hairless. The name went back to the time when the bladder of gas Gag had been using to blow open the strongbox aboard a barge had blown up in his hand instead. His hair had grown back around the flash-burn scars, but a name is a name. "The word’s out you’re looking for a snatcher," Gag said.

"Sure," I said, "why not? Have you got one?"

"Who knows?" Gag said. "This town’s so crowded this week, you can’t keep anybody straight."

I tossed him an ool. Fortunately for me, Skargool's wife was paying expenses. Gag flagged the barmaid. The barmaid brought him a bottle, which Gag upended, wiping green froth off his mustache. He burped, and said, "Okay, now," leaning forward on one elbow. "A guy hears lots of things. You don’t always know what to think, you know what I mean? This guy Skargool, one day you hear one thing, then you hear something else. One day everybody wants to work for him, the next day you hear he's flogging his crews."

Slipron, whose attention had apparently wandered off to another part of the room, looked back at Gag. "Flogging?"

"Yeah, flogging," Gag said, "I mean like with whips. All these years he's shipping grain, oats, like, and then all of a sudden they say there's always been loot underneath. Treasure, I mean, gold, jewels, real loot. Buried under the oats, all these years. I mean, I've got nothing against oats, I've got to eat too, but oats isn’t the same as loot."

"That's an interesting story, Gag," I said. "Now work the Creeping Sword into it."

"You out of your mind?" Gag said. "What’s that?"

"That’s what I'd like to know. You find it out and it’s worth money."

"How’s about a, whatta you call it, a retainer?"

"I’ll pay," I said, "when I have something to pay for. Don’t push your luck. You hear plenty of stuff, Gag, and that’s good. Find out who started this talk about Skargool."

Gag scowled and drained the bottle. I had been keeping an eye on the rest of the room, watching for someone else, and now he came in, heading straight for a small table in the back of the place in a corner mostly in shadow. I rose and went over. A steaming casserole was already present on the table, and the guy was digging into it by the time I crossed the room.

I pulled up a chair across from him. "I want to talk to your boss," I said.

He didn’t bother to look up; I was sure he'd spotted me on my way over. He didn't miss much, that's why he had the job he had. "Are you on a case," the man said, swallowing a mouthful off his knife, "or you just looking for some action?"

"It’s a case."

He grunted, pulled a piece of fish out of the casserole, squinted at it, and threw it over his shoulder where it stuck to the wall. "We may have a job, too. Interested in some honest work for a change?" The guy laughed a coarse harsh laugh.

"Depends on the work," I said.

"Sure it does," he said. "Somebody'll come by your place."

"Right," I said. The table I'd shared with Gag and Slipron was empty, so I headed for the door. I was almost there when it crashed open behind a pair of lances and a rabble of tough-looking men wearing the freshly printed armbands of the Guard.

"All right, you goons," the corporal shouted as he raised a truncheon, "this place is closed! Move out to the street and -"

The place erupted. I ducked as a small table flew over my shoulder directly toward the corporal, plunged my fist into an eye, shook my left leg loose from a set of sharp teeth, and as I shoved a hand with a knife out of my way something crashed into my back and knocked me to the floor next to the wall. Sticking close by the wall, I dodged and crawled forward and climbed through a broken shutter onto the street. A knot of fighting guys spilled through the door to my left, the three Guard mercenaries watching the front of the building turned to deal with them, and I limped away from the bar down the street and around the first corner. My back was throbbing, but I figured that was part of the job; maybe I'd sock Skargool's wife for some extra expense money when I hit her with the final bill. I rinsed my face in a trough and walked away from the wharves into the city.

My office was over a laundry in the Ghoul’s Quarter near the wall on the south side, the clapboard sign with its open staring eye creaking gently in the breeze from the river. A man was waiting outside my door at the top of the stairs. "You are examining the disappearance of Mr. Edrik Skargool?" he said.

"What’s it to you if I am?" I said, unlocking the door.

He followed me into the office.

"I represent the Oolvaan Mutual Insurance Carriers."

Oh, no, I thought. "Insurance?"

"Yes indeed. Mr. Skargool has a substantial policy, amounting to perhaps 140,000 zalous."

I lowered myself gingerly into my chair. "Bonded insurance?"

"Yes, of course, bonded. Certainly."

Insurance, dammit, insurance. This was real trouble. I'd never worked an insurance case before, and I didn't want to start now. Look at it this way, a lawyer who’d once shared a bottle with me had explained things. When you can ride for an hour and get to a new place where there's a totally new set of laws and jurisdiction, when people disappear without a trace all the time, either because they're dead or just because they want to disappear, when you need to buy a policy in one city and know it'll be recognized someplace else, you’ve got to have one key thing. You've got to have some widespread authority nobody’s going to argue with.

Insurance was a contract with one of the gods.

The tweedy man crossed his legs. "Unfortunately, our organization is understaffed and" (he gave a delicate cough) "chronically overworked, so it is our policy to rely on local assistance for claims investigation whenever possible."

"Now wait a minute," I said. "Let’s clear a few things here. I -"

"I apologize if I have not made myself clear." With his faded tweed cloak and his slack pale face, he could have been any nameless functionary buried in a bureaucrat’s coattails. His voice, though, had the uncompromising tone of someone who always got his way, on his own terms. Even if he wasn't dangerous himself, he had to have big-time friends. “Whenever an investigation is in progress," he told me, "we employ its findings."

"Come on, at least you’ve got to pay a royalty on -"

"No. Consider the effort a tax on your business practice. You may also consider it a licensing test. We expect any investigator to comply with our own standards for proof-of-claim."

"Standards?" I said. "What do you mean, your standards? I know this job like I -"

"Then you will have no difficulties," he said, “will you. A causal chain or other validator of legitimacy must be demonstrated. Cases of fraud or collusion are punishable, both on the part of the beneficiaries and the investigator."

I'd never seen one of these policies, of course, but that wasn't going to be any excuse. If you got noticed by the gods, I'd always heard that the best thing to do was keep your mouth shut and do whatever they wanted, and hope they’d forget about you when you were finished. But what would it take to get finished? "What if this, ah, investigator can't come up with a definite solution? Sometimes nobody can tie up all the pieces, no matter how good they are."

"Ah," he said ."h’m. Indeterminate cases are not desirable. With proper validation and under special circumstances, they may be, ahem, reluctantly accepted. Quite reluctantly."

"Okay," I said, "I get it. I’ve got no choice. I’ll do what you want, I'm not an idiot. So what kind of insurance does Skargool have, anyway?"

"Life," he said, "Of course."

"Don’t you have ways of knowing whether he's still alive?"

He turned up one corner of his mouth in what might have been a smile, or maybe just a nervous tic. "Omnipotence is not one of our patron’s virtues. These things take time and energy, and attention." He got to his feet.

"Just one more question," I said.

"Yes?"

"Who took out the insurance, and when?”

He gave me the tic again. "The wife," he said, "of course. One month ago."

“Right," I said. "How will I get in touch with you?"

"I will be in touch with you. Good day." The door closed behind him. I opened the desk drawer and took out the flask, then decided to just hit my head against the wall for a few minutes. I turned around, and while I looked for a spot on the wall that didn’t already have a dent the door creaked open behind me again.

"What now?" I said, but this time the man who’d come in was different.

With a shapeless cap pulled low enough over his face to rest on the bridge of his nose, and a generally squat frame, the guy looked like no further than second cousin away from a giant toad. "Da time ta see de boose is now," he said.

"Yeah," I said, "da boose." I forgot about the flask and followed after him out the door.

We wound around local streets, heading generally back toward the docks, and finally entered a shuttered house where we descended to the basement. Beneath an old rug was an iron grate. The guy rolled up the edge of the rug, being careful not to disturb a slender thread that ran from one frayed corner off into the darkness. Then he turned his back, did something behind him in the gloom, and waited. Running water gurgled below the grate, gradually growing fainter. Finally the grate clanged and squeaked open. The edge of a ladder was revealed, leading down into a big pipe that I hoped wasn’t the sewer.

A concealed mechanism drained the last swirls of water away as we reached the base of the ladder. Next to the ladder a section of the stone facing wall had opened, revealing a crawlway. Bending low, I followed the guy into the wall, through several ascending turns thick with slime and algae, and up out of the garbage into a small torchlit anteroom. Three other exits led down through the floor or into the walls in a similar manner as the one we’d entered through. Four men got up from a table and pushed me against the wall. One of them frisked me, two others kept their hands on their swords, and the final one nervously slapped a large cudgel against his palm. They didn’t find anything; as I kept finding reasons to reiterate I wasn’t an idiot. The thugs moved aside and one grunted, tilting his head in the direction of a wall tapestry. I moved the tapestry aside and went through the concealed door behind it.

The new room had walnut wall-panels, a bookcase filled with leather-bound volumes, and a large desk with a man seated next to it. The man was wearing a dressing gown embroidered with dragons and other mythical beasts and on his nose he had a pair of spectacles, through which he was studying a ledger-book. He looked mild-mannered enough, and he could be, but generally he wasn't: this wasn't the first time we’d met. The boss looked up at me, over the tops of the spectacles, and said, "Sit down. What's on your mind?"

"Its not a what," I said, sitting. "It's a who. Edrik Skargool. Somebody kidnapped him, but it doesn’t sound like you."

"Hah," he said. "The kid has a lip." He leafed through his book, alternately watching me over his glasses and glancing down into the book. "Skargool. Here he is." The boss read for a moment. "He's rich, yeah, but it's mostly property, not a lot of cash. He pays his protection dues regular, no trouble there. Kidnap rating’s low, so you’re right, hah, why should I take him out? Stupid. Whoever did it, stupid. Some people got no business sense." His eyes looked up at me again. "Like to know your own ratings, hah?"

"Sure, except I’m sure it would cost me more than I’m worth to find out. I'm sure you know that, too."

"Hah," he said noncommittally.

"Anyway, that’s beside the point," I said. "The one thing I do need is this. You have anything on somebody called The Creeping Sword?"

"The what? Creeping Sword? You got to be kidding. What idiot kind of name is that?"

I passed him the kidnap note.

"Creeps," he said, studying it. "Some punk. Punks all over the place. Whole damn town is crawlinl with punks." He glowered at the note, then glowered at me, and then spun the note back at me like a throwing star. Then, for good measure, as I ducked out of the way and let the note chew itself into the back of my chair, he grabbed his ledger book and hurled it across the room. It was big, and heavy for a book, and made a loud thud against the stone wall. The guards from the room outside the tapestry suddenly appeared and began to drag me out the rest of the way out of my chair. "Civil wars," the boss yelled, glowering now at everyone in sight. "I hate ‘em. Bad for business. Lousy for everybody. What?"

I had been gargling at him, hoping he would remember me before the boys actually started carving. The boss stared at me for a second, then said, "Forget about him, he's all right. Put him down."

They dropped me back across the chair and filed out. I sat up, worked my shoulder around a bit, and worked the kidnap note out of the wood of the chair as I worked on steadying my breathing. "Thanks," I said.

"Yeah," he said, which from him passed for an apology. "So I've got a job too you can come along and help. You know Kriglag?"

“I’ve heard of him, never met him." Kriglag ran the wharf rackets.

"He’s a dope. He thinks he's gonna work with this new Venerance, what's-his-name, cooperate with all these fresh mercenaries, end up fencing their loot maybe, I don't know what all. Maybe he's a big enough idiot to work with somebody who’d call himself a Creeping Sword."

"I’m listening."

"I'm gonna take him out," the boss said. "I'm gonna take him out tonight. You want to be there?"

"Yeah," I said, "I do. Thanks again."

"You're with Netoo." He jerked his head at the tapestry. I went through it and told the boys I was with Netoo. I followed the one with the cudgel through another tapestry and down a hall.

There were thirty of us, more or less, divided in four teams. I strolled around the assembly room, asking the usual questions, until we moved out.

Night had fallen by the time the first two teams sloshed off into the sewers; sometimes I think more activity and commerce in Roosing Oolvaya takes place in the sewers than overhead in the streets. Nevertheless, the bunch of us under Netoo headed into the streets with the sorcerer. She was up in the front, next to Netoo, helices of fine blue lines making gloves around her gesturing hands as she walked. The blue shapes left a slowly fading trail behind her in the air.

The clamor of some riot a neighborhood or so to the north came intermittently to us through the tangled alleys. There was no sign of the Guard, though, and I wondered if the boss had managed to convince somebody to concentrate on other areas for this particular evening. A tendril of river fog curled around a building ahead of us and up our street. We entered the fog, and Netoo stopped the team to confer with the magician.

The magician gestured a few times, almost lost from my view in the fog, cocked her head to listen to nothing, and nodded. Netoo motioned us on. We crept one block, exiting and then reentering the fog, turned right, and moved down an alley. Netoo touched the shoulder of a man holding a bow. The man fitted an arrow and shot. The arrow turned into a shadow and disappeared into the mist. This was followed half-a-second later by a soft clunk and rattle, and then the thunk of a falling body. The magician nodded again and whispered to Netoo. "Around the next corner," Netoo said. "The house with hanging plants. All ready? Okay, go."

We spread out and padded quickly around the corner.

Shadows dark against the light mist flitted over the rooftops from other directions. They hit the roof as we hit the front.

Steel abruptly clashed. I paused to let my teammates engage, then charged through the crowd and hit the door shoulder-first. The door burst easily open onto a courtyard with other forms already struggling there. I charged through them too, aiming for the inner door. Shouts of "No mercy for traitors” and "Death to the usurper!”, our attempt to disguise our origin by implicating local malcontents, came from behind, above, and below, indicating that the sewer teams had reappeared as well. I grappled with the inner door and it sprang open. A robed functionary scuttled past down the interior hall, looking frantically in my direction. I grabbed him by the collar and said, "The Creeping Sword."

"I know nothing," the man said, trying to faint, so I hit him over the head with the flat of my sword.

It went like that for awhile. Then I found Kriglag. Taken totally unprepared and with all his escape routes cut off, Kriglag was trying to make the best of a hopeless situation. He was drunk. I wedged myself into the closet with him and dragged him to his feet. Jugs rolled off his chest and shattered on the floor. "Kriglag!" I said.

"Hwazigah?" he said, eyelids sagging.

"The Creeping Sword, Kriglag. The Creeping Sword!" I said, yelling it into his ear.

"A bad, a bad guy," Kriglag said, and started to snore. I shook him. Then I broke the neck off a jug he’d apparently missed in the confusion and poured the contents over his head. Kriglag opened his eyes and said, "Wha?"

I put the tip of my award where his crossed eyes could focus on it. “The Creeping Sword, Kriglag."

"Gemmy outa here.”

"Tell me about the Creeping Sword."

“You get me outa here first."

I slapped him across the jaw. "Tell me why I should bother,” I said.

Kriglag’s head was clearing. "Creeping Sword, yeah. This guy from up-river someplace. Had this idea. He'd make cash and a good-guy image at the same time, snatching rich rats."

Maybe his head wasn't that clear after all. "Rich rats?"

"Rich scum." Kriglag paused to cough for breath. "Guys with lots of dough who got it by being scum. People nobody would miss, be glad to see them go."

"So he came to you. What did you tell him?"

"I’m no fool." Kriglag said. "I told him, try it out. If it worked maybe I’d take him on."

"Where did he go?"

"I dunno. He was supposed to come back when he had results."

"Anybody else know about it?"

Kriglag smirked and breathed a foul breath in my face.

"My partner," he said.

I lay the edge of my sword along his throat. "Who?"

Kriglag kept smirking. "Get me out of here or you'll never know."

I hesitated. Then, with a chorus of "No collaboration!", a bunch of my new friends burst into the room behind us. Kriglag looked over my shoulder at them, glanced back at me, and lunged toward my blade. I couldn’t believe a survivor type like Kriglag would go so far as to impale himself, but just in case I pulled the sword out of his reach. "You’re a sap," he yelled at me as they dragged him away.

I spent a few minutes with his ledgers. Kriglag kept records so lousy you couldn’t figure out a thing, which surely meant, from his perspective, they were some pretty fancy accounting. Still, I was able to tell that he’d done a lot of business moving hot goods, goods that had started out in warehouses on the wharf. I couldn't find out which warehouses, but I made a list of the stuff. One of Netoo's people arrived to take charge of the books, so I wiped off my sword and went home.

A messenger woke me in the middle of the night with a note from Turbot.

New message received. Ransom drop tonight.

Turbot, always maniacally terse, apparently had things under control. I went back to sleep.

I SPENT THE NEXT MORNING running down the list of business rivals Skargool’s wife had given me. None of them had anything bad to say about him, and none of them seemed to have anything to hide. None of them had missed any of the hot warehouse goods Kriglag had entered in his ledger books, either. It wasn’t until I was finishing up with the fourth name on my list that I suddenly wised up. I asked the guy for his own rundown of Skargool’s competitors.

The names he gave weren’t on my list.

Their stories were even more interesting than the ones from the list of Skargool's wife. They knew Skargool better. They knew him well enough to know he’d been getting upset. He’d found out someone was stealing from his stocks. And he’d gotten suspicious about his wife's fidelity.

They couldn't understand how Skargool had suddenly picked up these rumors about flogging, and slavers, and being a general taskmaster. They all liked him, and they were his competitors in a notoriously cutthroat field. According to them, he was honest to a fault and underworked his employees, if anything.

Then I wasted a few hours talking to firepen dealers.

The firepen had been a fad item a few seasons before. After the initial enthusiasm, people realized that the pens wore out much too fast to be of real use, and in any case weren't good for anything besides graffiti. They would write on walls, metal, pavement, indeed on anything but paper and parchment. Paper and parchment they would ignite. Flashy but impractical, and occasionally downright dangerous. The type of thing some upriver yokel might think was pretty hot stuff.

One minor sorcerer was still making the things, selling some out of the stall in front of his home and a few others to local merchants. Demand had settled down to maybe a dozen pens a month, so he was able to tell me quickly where each one of them had gone. The second merchant he sent me to was a hit.

"This kid with pimples and a big rusty sword and an accent," the woman said. Displayed on a table in her stall were an array of neatly stacked fresh fish and assorted gewgaws in baskets. "Thought he was heaven’s gift itself. Maybe he was, back home, with them country girls." She sneered at me and tried to sell me a fish.

The guy had bought the pen three days before, which fit.

I went back to the wharves to hunt up Glinko. When I found him, I wished I hadn’t looked. He’d been fished out from the ebb spot behind a piling under a wharf. Somebody had gotten his fingers around Glinko's throat. The marks of the fingers remained, and something sharp on one of the fingers had torn open his carotid.

As I gazed down at Glinko I became aware of another man gazing down next to me. It was the representative of the Oolvaan Mutual Insurance company. "You are making progress?" he asked.

"Absolutely," I said to Glinko. “Lots of progress."

“Will we have to pay on the claim?"

"Without knowing the exact terms of Skargool's policy, I don’t know. You might."

"When will I know?"

"Tonight," I said, "sounds like a good bet."

He inclined his head at me and stepped away. Since I was already in the area, I stopped in to see Chog, the manager at Skargool Cargo. The man with the boat-sized sharp-jeweled ring.

"Had some trouble, I see," I said to him. One of his eyes was red and purple and swollen shut, and his knuckles were scraped raw.

“With the Guard," said Chog. "Hounding me, they were, mercenaries hounding me, me with a reputation in this city."

"Right. Mrs. Skargool got another note this morning, did you hear?"

"Good news, that must be good news. My friend's return must be near. The two of us, Skargool and me, like brothers."

"So you said," I said. "I'm going to make the ransom drop tonight."

"I must know the outcome as soon as possible."

“As long as you mention it, you can hear it direct. Drop by Skargool’s house tonight around midnight."

"Midnight. I surely will be there." Chog smiled.

I went to Skargool’s myself and settled accounts with his wife. She was holding up remarkably well under the strain, tried flirting with me, more seriously this time, and everything. I took Turbot aside and discussed things with him, and then he took his sword and left.

I had never seen that morning’s note, so I examined it to pass the time. It was firepen on copper again. When I compared it to the first one, though, the script was slightly different. I showed it to Mrs. Skargool.

"You ever see this handwriting before?" I asked her.

She held it close to her face and studied it carefully, then looked up at me, her clear blue eyes wide and guileless. "No, no, I1m certain I've never seen this before," she said. "Is it important?"

"Not really," I said.

At dusk a messenger arrived with the last note. The messenger didn’t know anything, he'd just been handed the note on a street corner with an oolmite coin, and after handing it over he scurried quickly off into the dark without even asking for a tip. The note read:

Pack the money in two sacks. At eight the detective will take the sacks and walk to the corner of Avenue of the Fifth Great Flood and Brewer Street. He will come alone.

The intersection was in a shabby section of the wharf district. We prepared the loot, and at eight I left the house.

Tacked to a wall at Fifth Great and Brewer was a folded cloth. Inside the cloth was another copper plate. The inscription told me to go to the Haalsen Traders wharf, which was about a three-minute block away. At the wharf, yet another note instructed me to go down a ladder and put the sacks into a dinghy moored at the base. It was about time to put the sacks down somewhere; twenty thousand zalous could get pretty heavy on you. The note also suggested I wait at the bottom of the ladder for the next half-hour or so. I put the bags in the boat, a cable tied to the boat drew tight and pulled the boat away into the shadows under the wharf next door, and I cooled my heels for a time. When I decided I'd rested long enough I climbed the ladder and went back to Skargool's house.

As soon as I walked through the door Skargool’s wife pounced. I'd had trouble dragging a useful word out of her for two days, and now she’d finally decided to talk.

"Did you give them the money? Where's the money now, didn’t you get it back? Where’s my husband? What -?"

"Shut up," I told her. "I only want to say the whole thing once, and I1m not going to say it until everybody's here."

"Where's my husband?"

"I don’t think he's coming."

She started to snarl and spit at me, but at this point I didn’t care. I knew her too well by now, not that there was that much to know. Kardu Chog the manager arrived, followed shortly after by Turbot. He gave me a very slight nod and sat down by the door.

"Now will you tell me -" said Skargool's wife.

"Not yet," I said. "That's not everybody."

The wife and Chog both started. "What are you talking about'?" Chog said.

"What I said," I said. "We’re waiting for somebody else."

Mrs. Skargool looked around nervously, at everything and everybody except Chog.

Exactly at midnight, several minutes later, there was a final knock on the door. It was the guy from the insurance company.

I stood up and started to talk. "Skargool’s dead," I said, mostly addressing his wife. "He was probably dead before you came to see me. Skargool was kidnapped by The Creeping Sword, but that's about all anybody's told me that's been true.

"Chog, here, was the silent partner of Kriglag -"

Chog made a sudden lunge out of the couch.

"Stay," the insurance agent said.

Chog stayed. His hand had frozen in the air, on the way into his opposite sleeve, and one foot was raised. I nodded at Turbot. He went and pulled a long knife out of Chog's sleeve, then pushed him back onto the sofa. Chog was breathing, and his eyes were darting frantically, but otherwise he didn't move at all. Turbot sat down too.

"Kriglag ran the wharves," I continued, "and one of the things he ran was hot merchandise. A lot of the merchandise was stuff that Chog stole from his own warehouse. Skargool's warehouse, really, but Chog was running it. Since Chog kept the records and Skargool trusted him, it took awhile for Skargool to catch on.

"By the time he did, Chog had another plan. Kriglag had told him about The Creeping Sword. The Sword was this idiot kid from upriver someplace, probably, and he had this idiot idea. He would kidnap a businessman who was both rich and nasty to his employees, but not so nasty that someone wouldn't be willing to pay the ransom. I guess the Sword wanted to become some kind of folk hero, kidnapping only people who deserved it. If his victims didn’t show up again, either, nobody was supposed to be too upset. After all, they were bad people, right?

"All Chog had to do was run around spreading stories about how rich and how terrible Skargool was, and wait for the Sword to bite. I don’t know exactly how long it took, but he was right on the mark. The Sword showed up, right on cue.

"The thing was, Chog was following Skargool too, and when the Sword picked up Skargool, Chog followed the Sword. After the Sword wrote his first kidnap note, Chog came in and got rid of them both.

"That was it for The Creeping Sword, and that was it for Skargool. That’s about it for the case, too." I waited until I could see the look of relief appear on the face of Skargool’s wife. That’s how much I didn’t like her. "Except for one thing," I said to her, "the insurance. That was dumb, real dumb, taking out the policy yourself. I don’t know whether you love Chog or he loves you, or whether he made you think he does or you made him think you do, and I don’t care. I don’t even care if you deliberately set me up so I'd figure out about Chog and the Sword and think that was the whole story. What I do care about was the other thing on your husband’s mind, finding out that you and Chog were playing around behind his back, and probably figuring out the other reason he’d never noticed Chog stealing from him. You, keeping his attention distracted. It wasn't just Chog, it was you too. Both of you conspired to kill Skargool and get the insurance and take over the business."

She had frozen, like Chog, when I mentioned the insurance. The insurance man hadn’t bothered to interrupt, he'd just pointed a finger at her. I turned to him.

"Satisfied?" I said.

"Eminently," he said. He pointed a finger at Chog and then at Skargool's wife. Balls of flame materialized and consumed them. Then his form lit up in a quick flash followed by a column of billowing smoke. When vision returned a few seconds later he was gone, apparently dematerialized into the vapor. I think only I noticed the catch on the front door as it snapped shut, and the small puff of cold outside air. That was all right with me; I figure everybody's entitled to their tricks of the trade.

"Who was that?" said Turbot.

"Either a magician working for the insurance company," I said, "or some god, slumming." Hopefully he wasn’t a god, and if he was I hoped I'd done well enough by him so now he'd leave me alone. As it turned out later, I'd done too well for my own good, but I still didn’t think I'd had a choice. We split the ransom money, which Turbot had stashed outside after he'd recovered it from the hiding place he'd found when he'd tailed Chog from the ransom pickup spot earlier, and went home.

It had been a lousy case. I’d sort of liked Glinko. I thought I would have liked Skargool, too.

Chapter 3 THE GREAT KARLINI’S PROBLEM

WROCLAW BEGAN CLEARING THE DISHES. "Thunda-tenchon dropped by the house about a year ago," said Ronibet, Karlini's wife, spearing the last floret of broccoli and handing her plate to Wroclaw. "Stayed for a month eating up all our food, but we did manage to make some good progress with him while he was around. I heard he went off and gave a presentation on our results at a conference down on the coast. ‘Manifold Processing in Stabilization of Third-Order Aura-Linked Matrices’ - isn't that what we called it, dear?"

"Huh?" said Karlini. He had spent the meal alternately muttering to himself and staring darkly at the walls. It was highly uncharacteristic behavior for Karlini, whom Max often thought was the most manic talker he'd ever met. Karlini’s gaze wandered off again.

“I haven't gone to a conference in years," Max said, wiping the remains of a fruit rind from his clean-shaven lip. His tunic, which he had loosened for comfort, was open at the neck, revealing a small amulet covered with a delicate filigree of microscopic runes, several dust-speck jewels scattered through the curls. "Haven’t wanted to waste the time. Nobody ever says anything important at those things anyway; all the good stuff they always want to save for themselves. Not that I blame them, mind you."

Wroclaw appeared again with a cigar box. Karlini stirred and reached for it but, at a sharp glance from Ronibet, slumped back into his chair. Max took a cigar, bit the tip off, stuck the other end in his mouth, and, waving off Wroclaw's long flaming match, snapped two fingers in front of the cigar. The end of the cigar sparked red and a small cloud of smoke arose.

"Always showing off, aren’t you," Ronibet said.

Max turned his hand over, revealing a miniature striking pad and flint affixed to the end of his thumb and third finger. Max grinned at her, then slipped the device off and returned it to a pocket. "So how's that animalcule stuff you were up to?"

"It's coming along," Ronibet said. "Remember that cell theory we talked about? All living matter can be subdivided into other microscopic living units down to a certain level? It's now clear that the theory is substantiated. Not only that, I think I've identified those food-to-magic conversion organelles you postulated."

Max puffed thoughtfully on the cigar. "Good work," he said. "Better than good, important. If you can figure out exactly how magical essence gets produced, down inside these cells of yours, then the Plan becomes more than just a mad pipe dream."

"You and your Plan," Karlini muttered. "As long as I've known you, there's always been the Plan. And what good has it ever done you? What good has it done for any of us? Just a lot of fool dreaming, that’s all it is. We’ll never be rid of the gods, there’s no use even talking about it.”

"What's eating the Great one?" Max said to Roni. "I thought he wanted to quit being dominated as much as any of us. Don’t I remember him going on and on about getting his free will back?"

"I've changed my mind. There’s no such thing as free will," said Karlini. "If it's not the gods it’ll be something else. Politics, economic forces, bad weather, there's always some force running your life."

"Yeah, fine, then," Max said. “The force that’s running my life at the moment is you, you nincompoop, so there. You planning to tell me what I'm doing here and why you’re in such a crabby mood or am I supposed to keep dragging it out of you chunk by chunk?"

"He's right, dear," Roni said. "Knowing Max, I think he's been very patient with you."

"Yeah, that's me," Max said, "the very soul of patience. So will you tell me about this curse, already? You can't leave the castle, you said. Does that mean the invisible wall of molasses, the endless maze, the -"

"His heart stopped," Ronibet said.

Max looked at her, looked at Karlini, uncrossed his arms and leaned forward, then sank back in his chair. "Hmm." Max examined his cigar absently, stuck it back in his mouth. A large cloud of smoke rose. Max followed it upward with his eyes until it grew together, all at once, and coalesced into a compact ball. "You walked out the door and keeled over?"

"That's about the size of it, Max," Karlini said.

"Now that," Max said, watching the smoke ball roll along the ceiling, "is very interesting indeed. Was it a spell or a curse, I wonder. I assume you had your life-protectives running? What am I saying, of course you did. Could this thing have keyed off them?"

"I thought of that," Karlini said. "I haven’t just been sitting around here doing nothing but mope. I've come up with a lot of possibilities, and none of them have been any help at all."

"Don't get testy again," said Max. "Settle down, I was just thinking out loud. You brought me here so I could figure out a way to get you out of this, you don't have to get sharp at me. There’s no way around it – better go back to the beginning and give me the whole story." He raised an eyebrow and eyed Karlini.

Karlini ran a hand through his hair and absently ruffled it further. Ronibet looked at the hair and sighed. "All right, Max," said Karlini, staring off at a line of brightly colored pennons dangling from the mezzanine balcony. "This is how it started. We're sitting at home, the place on the cape by the ocean, you remember it. Nice morning, clear sky, no portents, nothing, so we're having breakfast outside on the terrace for a change, when all of a sudden a whirlwind starts to blow up. I reached for the napkins -"

"Stick to the facts," Max said.

"Huh?” said Karlini.

"You've never reached for a napkin in your life, pal."

Karlini looked over at Ronibet. "This is supposed to be a friend?" he said.

"Yes, dear," Ronibet said, "and not just any friend, one of your very best friends. That's why you’re going to ask him to risk his life for you, and why he's going to do it."

Max grabbed his cigar out of his mouth and leaned forward. "Now just a second there -"

"Hear the whole thing first, Max," Roni said.

"… Yeah," Max said. "Just remind me to stop making friends, all right, Karlini?"

"Okay," Karlini said, "Roni went for the napkins, and … where was I?"

"The gong," Ronibet said.

"Right, okay," Karlini said. “So we're looking off the terrace into this whirlwind, which seems to be centered about half-a-mile from the house just uphill from the beach where the scrub starts. The wind has kicked up something fierce even where we're sitting, but because of the dust and flying grass and shrubs we can tell that the thing is a lot more intense at the center, so intense that it’s starting to form a funnel and stretch up into a tower. Then, all of a sudden, the sky rings."

"The sky?" Max said. “Rings, with sound?”

"That's right, like we’re sitting under a solid metal dome, and someone’s just hit it with a rod about ten miles long. Dull metallic boom, just massive, the sky reverberates, the house, the ground, us, everything - it's like an earthquake with sound. All the dishes bounce off the table. I'm barely able to keep from bouncing off the terrace, but my insides feel like goo in an eggbeater. And then, right in the middle of the whirlwind, this castle starts to materialize."

“This castle," Roni said.

"By now giant bolts of lightning are running up and down the wall of the funnel cloud. As we watch, the lightning sparks begin to light up a ghostly image of a castle. At first all it looks likes is an image, a mirage or some strange optical effect, since it’s transparent and parts of the castle don’t appear to be there at all. The lightning keeps flashing, and as the image of the castle gets more distinct, we can see that it's rotating slowly in the same direction as the funnel, hanging in mid-air a couple hundred feet off the ground. Then we get a really sharp bolt on the far side, and before I finish squinting from the flash the castle starts to solidify in earnest and drop down toward the ground at the same time. The wind starts to die. The castle drops faster, still turning, and then it hits the ground. Everything shakes again and the earth jumps all over the place, about what you'd expect if a small mountain suddenly came out of nowhere and fell in your backyard, one last bolt of lightning strikes one of the towers, and then the lightning's gone. The castle digs itself into the ground like a corkscrew, slows, and stops. The funnel pulls up into the air, the wind dying, and all of a sudden it’s gone, too. Everything’s quiet and peaceful. Just like it was about thirty seconds before, except the only difference is that now there’s this castle sitting at the edge of the beach, chunks of dirt torn up all around it, what's left of a grove of trees sticking out from under the right side, and a small cloud turning slowly overhead and pouffing out in little streams of vapor.”

“So of course,” said Max, “the first thing you did was run right over.”

“You’d have done the same thing,” said Karlini.

“Yeah, well, maybe,” Max allowed.

"So I ran some scans on the castle from the house, but as far as I could tell, it was inert. Given the nature of the manifestation we’d just seen, it was certainly a surprising result, but it held up on cross-check. From everything I could find out, the castle was nothing more than a pile of rocks and mortar and the usual construction stuff. Roni wanted to leave it alone,” said Karlini, glancing at her and then quickly looking away to study the ceiling again, “but I couldn’t, you know, just let it sitting there, looming away, not explaining itself at all. In the back of my mind was the thought that the owner might be about come out and decide to conquer the neighborhood, or maybe that somebody had stolen the place and dumped the evidence on us – anyway, with things looking the way they did, I thought it would be safest to check it out further and at least try to figure out what we were dealing with.

“I picked out a few supplies -”

"He emptied out half the lab and piled the stuff on poor Haddo," Roni put in.

"- some relevant equipment - things I knew we might need - and we strolled over.

"A good portion of the structure is under water at the moment, so you couldn't get the full impact on your way in, Max, but this place is big. Seen up close, right from the base, it just hung there in the sky, massive and craggy, all these towers and battlements and hulking escarpments holding who the hell knew what kind of nastiness. Black stone, and gray, scarcely a touch of color in the whole place, except for some lichens and some singed-looking moss on the walls. And absolutely silent, not a sound, the kind of quiet you hear in the forest when some serious creature has just chased most everything out and anybody's who's left is just holding their breath and trying not to move, hoping the thing doesn’t notice them and goes away. But every test I ran, even standing next to it, was negative. As far as I could tell, the castle had never been near a spell in its life.

"It was cold, though, cold enough so frost was condensing on the walls and the air was getting chilly just from standing next to it. There hadn't been any snow or ice on it when it arrived, so I made the tentative assumption that whatever process had landed it there had also sucked the heat out. Now, I'm not sure that’s the whole truth, but I don't know if it matters.

"We decided to take a walk around and see if there was anything different about the back. There was no obvious way in on our side, you see, and I wasn't sending anyone up a sixty-foot sheer rock wall unless I had to. If the ground had been perfectly flat, a brisk stroll around the castle back to the place we'd started would have taken at least twenty minutes, maybe half-an-hour. Of course, as I've said, the terrain was really a mess from the castle trying to screw itself into the ground. Right up next to the wall the earth dropped down ten to twenty feet where the thing had dug itself its own earthen moat. Cracks and pits and snaky crevasses were running all over the place, and mounds and rough hills were piled up between them. The smell of churned dirt hung everywhere.

"The castle didn’t stay exactly quiet, either, as it turned out. As we clambered along, every so often we’d hear it give a creak or a rasp or a giant groan as it settled, and the ground would quiver a bit all over again. The thing that was starting to worry me more than anything else, in fact, was the idea that the castle had dropped in for a visit, and was getting ready to take off again, probably with the same wind and storm and generally messing up the neighborhood it had arrived with. As it turned out, of course, I was right, but it wasn't imminent at that point.

"So on the side of the castle facing away from the house, we finally found something helpful. The rock base the castle was resting on looked like the top of a mountain that had been sheared away. Parts of it had been filled in or built up with additional rock, you know the way that sort of construction goes, but the area we were facing was solid cliff. About thirty feet up, where the cliff seemed to end and the rock wall began, we could see a gateway. A roadbed extended out from this gate over our heads. Since we were looking from underneath, we could see a set of big buttresses springing from the cliff wall to support the bottom of this roadbed. Where the buttresses ended, about ten feet out from the wall, the roadbed also ended in a ripped-off edge where the rest of the span had apparently been torn away. So we backed up for a better look and spotted a portcullis in the gate, partly raised - an entrance, sure enough, but it was still thirty feet up. By the time we had finished our walk around the castle, though, it was apparent that that was the best-looking way in.

"I didn't want to use any active magic around the castle, at least until I had a better idea of what was going on, so that meant anything dramatic like levitation was out. We all know how much energy levitation takes, too, and I didn't want to incapacitate myself for a week just to get into a position where the trouble might really start. Instead, Haddo managed to get an arrow with a trailing line up through the portcullis. We pulled through a rope and I climbed up the wall.

"The place still looked deserted from the top of the roadbed. Beyond the metal spikes of the portcullis, the road made an abrupt turn to the right and rapidly ascended, so my view of the inside was limited. I could see a few burned-out torches set in sockets in the walls, and a niche for a guard station, but that was about it. Roni thought it was a perfect setup for a trap, and frankly I thought so too, so I ran a few more probes – everything I could think of, in fact. Again, nothing. I checked the portcullis and the gateway itself. Nothing. I even pushed a mirror through the entrance to inspect the inside surfaces of the gateway. Nothing, nothing, nothing. So I walked in. And, of course," Karlini said, holding his head and looking disgusted, "there was something, and it got me."

He took a drink of water.

"I walked through the entrance and the most powerful field spell I've ever felt jumped out of nowhere. Whoever set it up had power to burn, power that would have put any of us in a coma for a year. Roni told me they saw a burst of light, mostly reds and purples. All I know is that my aura suddenly went visible. Whenever I've looked at it, it manifests as a solid shell standing about a foot out from my body. The shell has a slightly fuzzy edge, and the space is filled with blocks of shifting color. Since I'd restored my personal defenses before starting out, I should have seen an unbroken surface with a dull metallic, slightly reflective sheen. Instead, when this field hit its surface the aura rippled, irregular patches all over the place turned yellow and started to glow, and then these glowing yellow patches began to peel up, like scales lifting off the skin of a snake. You’d have thought I was molting, if you can believe that. Small globules of writhing tendrils darted in through the gaps under these scales and spread out. The tendrils shot around like flying worms, diving through the floating blocks of aura and down into my skin. I could feel my consciousness being cataloged." Karlini shuddered. "It wasn't fun. It was like having each piece of my mind turned into a fingernail and drawn slowly down a long slate wall.

"Did I mention that I couldn't move a muscle? I tried to fight back, of course, but every defense, counter-spell, or neutralizer I thought of was squelched before it could even form. The thing had clamped such a lock on me, it was all I could do to even string two thoughts together. Seemed to go on forever even though not very much time had elapsed - less than a few seconds external - but you know how perception plays tricks when you're in that type of situation.

"Still, there was something strange about it, I mean something even stranger than the rest of it. I was aware that something was missing. You know how, even under the strongest attack, you always get some glimpse of the consciousness on the other end? Backscatter, or whatever? Well, this time there was nothing. It absolutely felt like there was nobody on the other end, nobody there at all, and never had been.

“Okay, so maybe they’d left a monitor trap, fine, you run into them sometimes, but they have tradeoffs. The heftier they are, the more difficult it is to hide them. The more you invest in them the more it takes out of you. And the more powerful they are, generally speaking, the more powerful you have to be to be able to charge them up.

"So there I was, caught in the most humongous thing of its kind I'd ever heard of, wondering who could have built it and having the sinking feeling they were on the way to see what their trap had reeled in. But they weren't."

Karlini stared at his glass of water. “Don’t we have anything more interesting than this clear stuff?” he said.

“You’ve had quite enough of the hard stuff lately, dear,” said Roni.

"Are you sure you’re on my side?” Karlini muttered under his breath. “Oh, all right. So these ectoplasm-style tendrils start to get shimmery, fall in on themselves, and go out, and patches of the field started to relax, and I discover all of a sudden that what was holding me up isn’t holding me up any more, I’m jerking in every direction, and while I’m falling down I’m seeing the last tendrils slide off into the flagstones. The rest of the field floats away and dissipates. My aura, by this point, was the shabbiest thing you've ever seen, tatters and holes and rips all through it, and I sure didn't have the energy to try to restore it. An aura may not be the person, as Iskendarian claimed, but at the very least it's reflective of the person's state. I felt like my aura looked. All I could do was lie there and try to breathe.

"Then I heard a noise out on the roadbed on the other side of the portcullis. Roni, disregarding my explicit instructions, had come up the rope after me. I opened my mouth to tell her to stay away, but before I could say a word she was over the edge of the drop and heading for the entrance. Of course, I shouldn't have worried, Roni's the smartest person I know. She stopped outside the gate."

"Well, he didn't look quite ready to die," Roni said, "at least not at that moment, so I didn't want to take the chance that running after him would call down the same attack on me.”

"I got myself rolled over and kind of staggered toward the exit," Karlini said. “I suppose you could say I made it. My body made it, anyway. Just as I crossed the plane of the portcullis I felt a terrible pain in my chest, like it was being crushed by a giant foot. I started to pass out. Roni grabbed me as I started to keel over backward -"

"He was also turning a fairly remarkable blue color," she said.

"- and we both fell back inside the gateway.

“Two things happened, or rather one thing happened and one thing didn't. The thing that happened was that the pain in my chest went away. The other thing was Roni - nothing happened to her. Nothing attacked. The monitor spell didn't appear."