CHAPTER THREE
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 sit there, looming away, not explaining itself at all. In the back of my mind was the thought that the owner might be about to 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 exactly stay 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.”
“It wasn’t a permanent guardian,” Max said, “it was a one-shot.”
“Right,” said Karlini, “and I’d sprung it.
“Roni and I sat there for awhile. When I could stand again we started to explore the place, see if there was any other way out. We didn’t find anything. The spell that had snagged me was the only trap we could see, but that spell had bound me to the airspace of the castle. Whenever I tried to leave my heart stopped. It wasn’t only through that first doorway, it was flying, climbing over the wall, teleporting, every possible way of getting away I could think of. Obviously, I wasn’t supposed to leave. Wasn’t isn’t the word. I’m still not supposed to leave.”
“However you had entered the castle,” Max said, “you would have activated the monitor. It didn’t care where you came in, it only cared that someone had come in.”
“That’s what we think too, Max. I also suspect the monitor was looking for the right kind of person, somebody with the right level of magical expertise. That’s the reason for all that intensive scanning and probing I went through; it was checking me out to see if I was qualified. I suspect that especially because of what happened later.”
“There had to be more,” Max said.
Karlini squinted at him. “Of course there’s more. Well. Roni and the rest could come and go at will, but I was stuck in here. The next thing I knew, they had all decided to move in with me. They carted over all the laboratory equipment and most of the library, and a whole pile of other stuff. The castle had plenty of food, so we weren’t about to starve. It also had some inhabitants of its own, like the big bird you rode in on. What it didn’t seem to have was a clue to what was going on.
“Then on the third day I was upstairs in one of the towers, searching an area I hadn’t visited before. I had been climbing a circular staircase that wound around the core of the tower, with rooms on each level opening off a landing. Most of the rooms were locked behind these solid wood doors cross bound with iron plates, and I hadn’t run across the keys yet, so mostly I’d been slogging up and down the stairs, looking for secret passages and suchlike. I was thinking about sitting down to rest for a moment when I came around the corner to the next landing, high up in the tower. The door off the landing was hanging open. I mean it wasn’t merely open, it was hanging there, dangling at an angle from the top hinge, scorched and gouged and pretty well bashed in. All the surfaces in that area were scorched as well - wall, ceilings, floor. An outline of burnt soot against one wall showed the form of a tapestry that had been flash-fried. I -”
“Was there a smell?” Max said.
“Yes, there was, it was a burnt odor, but the smell wasn’t fresh; say at least a week or two old, it wasn’t an illusion. Anyway, through the broken door I could see an office. As I climbed past the door, though, I suddenly realized that I had gotten sleepy, very sleepy, in fact so sleepy that I felt my eyelids dropping closed and found myself starting to snore. Without even knowing it I must have fallen to the floor, because that’s where I was later, but that wasn’t on my mind at the moment since I had slipped smoothly into a dream.
“I was in that same office, working on - something, I don’t know what. A wide window to my right overlooked the lower works of the castle and a mountain landscape. Even though I didn’t get a good look outside, I could tell that the mountains stretched much higher than the elevation of the tower. There were snowcaps at the upper levels. Something was on my mind, again I’m not sure what, and I decided to take a walk to think about it. I pushed back my chair and went to the door.
“The door was locked, but there was no lock apparent - and no doorknob, door pull, or lever either. Instead, I raised my right hand and touched my palm to the surface of the door. Aural colors appeared around my hand and rippled out over the door. The image of the door wavered, as though there had been a layer of thick clear liquid lying on the surface and plunging my hand into it had disturbed it. It didn’t seem that the substance of the door itself was rippling, it was more like tossing a stone into a pond - you can tell that the bottom of the pond isn’t really moving, but you’re getting a refractive effect from the waves in the water. Anyway, this ripple pattern spread rapidly out over the surface of the door. When the pattern reached the wall, the door swung open.
“I walked out onto the landing. Again, it was the same scorched landing I had just crossed while I was awake. The difference was that now, in the dream, it was intact - no soot, no fire, no damage of any kind. A colorful tapestry showing some kind of political conclave hung on one wall where I had seen its burnt outline a moment before. As I walked out the door, though, a bright glint on the floor caught my attention. I bent down to look. The glint was from a clear faceted jewel set in a unfamiliar gold ring. My mind was still distracted by whatever I had been thinking about, so before I quite knew what I was doing, I was reaching for the ring. Suddenly my mind clicked in. I realized I’d never seen that ring before, and it certainly had no business being there, just sitting on the floor, and I had better not touch it, but my hand kept going. The ring was pulling it in.
“I was frozen in position, bent over on the floor, fighting my own hand. My hand slowed, but I was already too late. My forefinger touched the ring.
“Sheets of lightning crashed out of the ring and danced along my body. The jewel was like a pinpoint slashed out of the sun. I felt - how do I describe it? - I felt like my aura was being drained down my forefinger and into the ring. More lightning came out, followed by balls of fire. My perception was strange, distorted, I was stretching out and being compressed and wrapped around, the world was getting vaguer and more distant, and then - snap! -the world was gone. And I woke up.”
Karlini took a drink of water, let his head flop back, and gazed up at the ceiling, which Max thought he must have memorized by now. Max looked away, staring at a spot over Karlini’s head, his lips pursed, and took the final few puffs on his cigar. Roni drummed her fingers on the table.
“Let me give you my analysis,” Max said finally, “and you tell me if it matches what you’ve come up with. Whoever the true master of this castle is, he set up a fairly involved anti-theft system, which you sprung part of. I assume that this - well, call him a person, even though he probably wasn’t - this person figured he might be attacked or kidnapped, even in his own castle. In fact, that’s what happened. Your dream was no dream, it was a replay. This person’s enemy had left that ring as a trap. The ring sucked in the guy’s aura and whatever aura-bound powers he had, and his consciousness too. Sounds like a pretty interesting ring, when you think about it … especially since the ring isn’t around now. You haven’t found it, right? Whoever set the trap transported the ring into the tower from some other place and then pulled it back when it had done its job.”
“Why couldn’t they have physically dropped the ring there?” Roni said. “Why spend the energy for a transport?”
“Even if you could get into a place like this in the first place, would you want to stroll up and plant a booby trap right under your victim’s nose? No,” Max said, “if it was me I’d spend the extra power and be glad of it. I’d rather not be anywhere in the vicinity. Anyway, the ring went off, but somehow the castle master managed to leave a record of his last perceptions in that area of the tower. He meant for this record to be triggered by the next person who showed up. Probably not just any next person, either, I’d bet, but rather the person who had set off the other alarm.
“Both the dream and the monitor and the whole moving castle itself are part of the alarm. If the master really was attacked and subdued, the castle would take off, and would keep going until it had found the right kind of person to get him loose, or to conduct the revenge if it was too late. The castle was also going to make damn sure that the person it had chosen didn’t leave until the rescue had been arranged.”
“Yes, but, Max,” Roni said, “the person who’d been trapped by the alarm couldn’t leave the castle to do the rescue.”
Max took a small bite out of the stub of his cigar and munched reflectively on it. “Well, Roni, that’s the major detail I don’t like. The castle master goes to all this trouble to trap somebody who’s supposed to rescue him, then makes sure that rescuer can’t leave the castle. There’s a couple of possibilities. One, the master figured the rescue could be done without the rescuer having to leave the castle. I assume if that was possible, Karlini would have already thought of something. Right?”
“It can’t be done,” Karlini said. “At least, I can’t figure out how.”
“We can go over it again later. The second possibility is that the person trapped in the castle was supposed to get somebody else to actually do the rescuing.” Max raised an eyebrow, swiveled it around at Roni and Karlini.
Karlini sighed. “Right, Max. That’s the way we figured it. The person in the castle is a hostage. That’s me. I’m supposed to pull in favors, or hock myself, or sell whatever treasure I have to get this guy rescued.”
“Or,” said Max, “you’re supposed to call in your friends.”
“How many magicians do you know of who have those kind of friends?” Roni said, with a touch of sarcasm.
“Aha,” Max said, “now that is exactly the point that concerns me the most. “ He rose and started pacing around the table. “If I were thinking about groups of magic-users, well, there’s the confederations and specialty guilds. Of course, their members aren’t what you’d call cordial to each other, they’re more backbiting societies than anything else. There’s the few teams and partnerships you run across now and then, but - why was your doorstep the first place this castle showed up?”
Karlini nervously adjusted his chair. “Well, it wasn’t really the first place - “
“Other stops aren’t the point if nobody sprung the trap, and you know it. It sounds like a setup. It sounds like a setup to reel in our gang, find out who we really are, and then -”
“Max, ever since I’ve known you you’ve been seeing plots -”
“Yeah, I’m still alive too, and -”
“But there’s never been a plot -”
“What about the -”
“Max, shut up,” Roni said. “You too, dear.” She glared pleasantly at them while she waited. “Thank you. Now, Max, Karlini’s trapped here. You know the only method we can think of to get him out is to rescue the owner of this castle. What Karlini didn’t tell you is that he’s already traced the ring. It’s in Roosing Oolvaya. Somebody has to go get it, and you’ve got the best chance of anyone we could find. Will you do it?”
Max had stopped with his back turned to the table and his hands clasped behind his back. “I’m the best one? Not Haalsen Groot? Krinkly Louise? Boorgonga? For that matter, what about Shaa? I was just on my way to see him, I know where he is.”
“You’re it, Max,” Karlini said, not looking at him either. “Groot’s settled down with his import business. Louise is down south someplace. Boorgonga might be in hibernation for all I could find out. And you can’t honestly tell me you’d wish this on Shaa, especially after what he ran into last time. He’s lucky he can walk again; he probably wouldn’t talk to any of us if we showed up with a cart full of bullion.”
“… You know this guy in the ring is probably a god. You know what that says about whoever trapped him.”
“We know, Max,” Roni said.
“You know what the gods think of me.”
“Max,” Karlini said, “give me another plan, any plan. Tell me who to hire. Let’s cook up some real zapper of a spell, scare up an army, I don’t know, come up with something else, anything.”
Silence fell, lengthened. Then Max turned around.
“One try,” Max said. “That’s all we get, we all know how these things work. And we all know damn well who’s the best choice to try it. I’ll do it. Of course I’ll do it. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.” He took the dead stub of cigar out of his mouth, looked at it, and scowled. The dark butt shimmered and began to glow, turned white, a painful white, and exploded. The stemware rattled. Sparks and tiny flaming embers drifted down. Max jammed his hands into his pockets, still scowling as he watched the sparks go out. “Aargh,” he said disgustedly. “All my life I work to learn more, pick up more tricks, get more competent. All so I can end up in messes like this.”
“All so you can help out your friend when he’s in a jam?” said Roni. “What else would you do with all that competence?”
“Yeah,” Max said, “right. I guess it’s too late to complain. I just hope this thing isn’t going to involve undead. I’ve had undead up to my neck lately.” He spat out a stray twist of tobacco. “I hate undead.”
Roni and Karlini looked at each other. “Uh, Max?” Karlini said.