CHAPTER TWO
When Karlini found out what had happened he was going to want my head. Of course, that would be his first reaction; after he’d had a chance to think about it he’d come up with something really nasty. At the moment, my take on the subject was that if he wanted my head he was welcome to it. It sure hadn’t done me or anyone around me much but lasting harm.
Well, like the saying goes, I hadn’t been careful what I’d wished for, so sure enough that’s what I’d gotten. Now I might have known who I was, but I hadn’t really solved anything. As it had turned out there probably hadn’t been anything I could have done about it either. At least I hoped that was the case. It was one thing if I’d just been trapped in my body, being dragged along for the ride.
But if there had really been something I could have done to prevent it...
“So,” said Gashanatantra.
I opened my eyes and glared at him across from me in the closed carriage. “‘So’? That’s all you can say, ‘so’? ‘So,’ what?”
“Getting testy, are you?”
“Oh, testy, is it? You don’t like testy? You think I should just accept it all and move along, none the worse for wear? You find out your true identity is a homicidal maniac and then tell me about testy.”
“So,” Gash repeated, “now that you have exposed your spleen, what do you propose to do about this situation - Iskendarian?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Isn’t it your name?”
“Damned if I know,” I told him. Damned if I know. We’d obviously been occupying the same body, and the same brain too, him and me, but that was just the trouble. Him and me. I might have been able to dip into the underlying goo beneath both of us and return with some learned skill or the occasional odd fact - and indeed I had - but that was as close I’d come to feeling like he was anything more than the guy in the other room down the hall. I’d naively figured that when I finally broke through to reveal my hidden identity, wiped from sight by the Spell of Namelessness, it would seem familiar. Sure, I thought maybe major areas would still turn out to be gone forever, not merely hidden from sight but scraped clean. What I hadn’t anticipated was that “I” still wouldn’t recall the slightest scrap of memory that would make me remember being whoever-I’d-been. “We” were still utter strangers.
Not strangers like long-lost brothers, either. We didn’t seem anything alike, which was fine with me, but didn’t go any distance toward resolving the question of whether I was responsible for his actions.
On the other hand, another thing that I’d feared hadn’t happened either. I hadn’t been merged into him. I hadn’t ceased to exist as an autonomous being; my personality hadn’t seemed to change, my sense of self was intact - and neither seemed anything at all like his.
A lot of this could be explained if he’d told the truth when he’d said he’d created me. That didn’t make me feel any better, especially considering the fact that as soon as he’d finished saying that he’d done his best to toss me back into whatever primordial soup he claimed to have ladled me out of.
Still, it all just didn’t make sense, not that I was about to tell that to Gash, of all people. I mean, sneaky plots and long-range plans may be a way of life, but what I’d heard from Iskendarian didn’t add up. Even if my worser half had decided to conceal himself from his enemies by going underground behind a false front, or he’d hatched some plot whose resolution had been a century out but for whose resolution he still intended to be on hand, there had to be better ways of running it than this harebrained contrivance.
Of course, given the facts as I knew them, that same harebrain was also me.
Gash was regarding me thoughtfully. He was still covered with filth and soot from what he’d referred to in passing as “that mess at the bridge,” but then I hadn’t exactly cleaned up either. Actually, I was in lousier shape than he was, not only in appearance but in damage, of which I’d suffered quite a bit while he showed no evidence of any problem deeper than approximately the level of his skin. Other than the problem of the habitual paths of his mind, which goes without saying. He’d had his strange little assistant in the flying brass ball flag down this carriage for us where we’d staggered the few blocks away the burning Karlini place, but then the assistant had swooped off himself, leaving the two of us here together this short while later and none the better for the experience.
“I seem to recall you were trying to uncover your identity,” Gash said finally. “Are you happy now?”
“Not particularly, no, thank you.”
“Not even when the identity you revealed is a name out of legend, a major player on the world stage?”
“Especially not.”
“I see,” he said. “But you must have realized from the outset that innocent bystanders are rarely subjected to the Spell of Namelessness. Did you think you were some purged paladin, some force for good cast down for your threat to the powers that be?”
“I don’t know. I’m new around here. You tell me.”
“Certainly, the number who might be described by such a noble definition is vanishingly few,” he said with an air of contemplation, “whether among the ranks of the mighty or those insignificant others you appear to prefer to seek yourself among.”
I slumped down further in the seat. “Good guys or not, I didn’t expect I’d be a major scourge on the world.”
“Yes. We should clearly discuss that aspect of the situation. What do you think he might be doing at the moment?”
“He’s suppressed, asleep, under control.”
“Are you certain? The jolt administered by Monoch was scarcely enough to banish him, I’m sure you must know.”
I thought about it. Would I know if he was awake and listening in? At this point I figured I would. The relationship between him and me - leaving aside for the moment the metaphysics behind those two referents when both of us were occupying the same body and the same brain - was not totally symmetrical. In the most recent stage I’d been able to watch him when he’d been active without causing him to black out or to know I was there; he’d thought I’d been eradicated. But could he be doing the same thing now to me? “Yeah, I’m pretty sure,” I lied. Only even if he was merely suppressed, what did I do now? What if he woke up again and tried to come back?
When he woke up again.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Why are you asking about him? Do you want to know from a concern from public safety or because you want to recruit him for some scheme of yours? How much did you have to do with bringing him out of hiding in the first place?”
He regarded me, and either I knew him well enough by now, or my insight was being supplemented from the time we’d shared the metabolic link that had let me pass myself off in his identity, or I’d played enough bid-and-bluff card games over the years, but I could virtually see the intricate orreries of his mind whirling in their epicycles, and then finally align themselves in decision. “l had my suspicions,” Gash said, “when we met, in Roosing Oolvaya, that there was more to you than was apparent on the surface. As far as l was concerned at the time, our initial meeting was happenstance. Subsequently one must question, as one must always question these things, but if a plan existed to bring us together its subtlety lies beneath the level of indifferentiable noise.
“As you know,” he went on, “there are always people who go about in disguise. Most often the masquerade is deliberate, occasionally not. In either case, being aware that some subterfuge is in progress is a very clear survival skill.” Gash leaned back and re-crossed his legs. “I fear that much you have attributed to paranoia or omnipotent machination is in reality the merely comprehensive application of principles of prudence. Omnipotence is all a matter of mirrors and smoke anyway, laid atop a mortar of superstition. Are we not men?”
“I assume you’re speaking rhetorically.”
Gash favored me with an occupationally inscrutable glance. “Don’t become caught up with labels. What is the practical definition of godhood if not one of power and demonstrable capability?”
“Well, you already did away with omnipotence, I guess, and I suppose by extension omniscience too, but what about creating and ruling the world, supernatural and eternal attributes, establishing ethical codes and -”
“There you’re mythologizing again. Your associate Maximillian would never speak that way, I assure you. If you examine your abilities as Iskendarian, or the history of your activities, you would find very little to differentiate yourself from a god, I can assure you of that as well.”
I pointed a finger at him. “You’re trying to appeal to my reasonability,” I said. “You’re trying to humanize yourself - to demythologize yourself - so that I’ll agree to do whatever it is you’re leading up to. You want me to think I’m not being intimidated into it. You want me to feel comfortable I’m making a decision as one peer to another instead of being stampeded into something I’ve got no choice about anyway. Why? Why are you bothering? Because of Iskendarian’s power?”
“Would you believe me if I said I wanted to be your friend?” Gash asked. “Of course not. Power obviously has a major role in everything that is happening, but raw power is scarcely the whole story. Fortunately it rarely is. At the -”
“Then why be a god if not for the power?”
“There’s power and there’s power. At the moment, as I was saying, the issue is the power of persuasiveness; in a word, politics. With the matter of Abdication versus Conservation looking to come to a resolution once and for all, things are very tentatively balanced. It may not be a great exaggeration to say the world of affairs is poised on the edge of chaos. Slightly different perturbations may send matters off on wildly different trajectories. “
“Wait a minute. Weren’t you the one who just masterminded that little eradication of Soaf Pasook down in Oolsmouth? And what about trapping what’s-his-name in the ring? Pod Dall? Wasn’t he supposedly the moderating influence in god-to-god affairs? If you’re worried about chaos, well, weren’t you responsible for setting up the situation in the first place? And don’t tell me there’s chaos and there’s chaos.”
Gash closed his mouth and fixed me with an exasperated glare, implying that he might have been preparing to issue just such a pronouncement. “The situation is much different now than it was a few weeks ago in Roosing Oolvaya, or even in Oolsmouth. Who knew that so many gods would fly at each other’s throats? Who would have expected that so many independent plots would reach their inflection points at so close to the same time? And your friends, Karlini and Maximillian - what were they working on in that laboratory we just left?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” I said. “The second quantum level, I think, and something having to do with microscopic animalcules.”
He gestured with a waving hand. “You see? If they had been successful, Maximillian would have either used this to jack up his own power and challenge us directly, or would have set it loose into the public domain, which would have been worse. With generalized second quantum level direct access anyone could have wielded the power of gods. It’s possible civilization or even life on the planet might not have survived that exercise.”
Why did I even feel like I might know what he was talking about? “But you think things are still that unstable even though the Karlini lab burned itself to ash?”
“Yes and no,” Gash said. “The building didn’t burn itself to ash, now did it?”
I didn’t like where this was leading. My alter ego was the one who’d destroyed the lab, and I was sure he hadn’t done it with an eye toward helping the world. Whatever they’d been working on in that laboratory was not unfamiliar to Iskendarian; the Karlini gang even had his notes on hand with them. Iskendarian had wanted his papers back and at least he hadn’t gotten them - as far as I knew they’d gone to embers along with everything else in the place. But how much could he do on his unaugmented own?
The cautionary comment Gash had applied to Max could stick to Iskendarian as well.
“You never got around to telling me what you want Iskendarian for,” I said, “and what you had to do with waking him up.”
He launched himself promptly into it, apparently happy with the direction I wanted to go. “As I said, I had my suspicions that there was more to you than merely the detective. After our earliest encounters, I began to think. Who could you be, I wondered. I examined the list of likely candidates. I established the metabolic link between us, quite gingerly, you may be sure, and even so you managed to get past the cutouts and deliver me some nasty jolts. But the data that came back up the link were not consistent with a straightforward god-profile. So I passed along Monoch. Monoch is a very old construct, you know. In addition to being a soul-eater, he has experience in handling -”
“Monoch eats souls?”
“Of course. I thought you knew. Can’t you sense it?”
“Monoch hasn’t been out of the cane too much lately. Did you tell him to eat my soul?”
Gash gave me a thin but wary smile. “Shall we say you would clearly be resistant to even a nip, much less a bite? Monoch did, however, finally decide you were someone he had once met. How much do you really know about Iskendarian?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you think I ought to know.”
“Very well. Iskendarian was never a god. He could have been, he just thought it was a waste of his time. He was contemptuous of everyone and everything. He was extremely clever, though. He was so blatant about his ingenuity that it seemed his prime motivation was to show just how indispensable he was, and how menial everyone else looked by comparison.
“Iskendarian did do work with the gods, however. You know about the Spell of Namelessness, for example, and since back then things were somewhat less structured than at present - less ossified, some might say - there was more give-and-take in general. When he dropped from sight it was fully in keeping with the way he’d conducted himself all along - high-handed and unexpected.
“It was thought something had finally blown apart in his face and taken him to pieces with it. Iskendarian was given to riding the edge, after all, and even with all prudent precautions luck eventually runs out. Iskendarian was given more to luck than prudence as a matter of philosophy, too. Still, since he was who he was, he’s been considered missing rather than gone. Now that so many years had passed, though, he had moved out of consideration as a player likely to be ever seen again.
“And then there you were.”
“You mean it suddenly dawned on you that Iskendarian had returned?”
“No...” Gash said slowly. “What I was trying to indicate here is that even after it was apparent that you were someone, it was still a significant surprise to learn that the someone was Iskendarian. Especially when Iskendarian began asserting himself. It was unclear what you... he... were up to.”
“‘Was’ unclear?”
He snorted. “Very well, is unclear. The clear thing, however, as I said before, is the highly destabilizing effect of his reappearance just at this moment.”
“Now come on. Certainly one de-iced guy can’t be worth all this attention.”
Gash was watching me warily. “You really don’t know?”
“What? Has he pulled this trick before?”
“Not this one, no, but others, yes. Iskendarian was known for wanton exercise of power. Indiscriminate experimentation. In the course of refining the Spell of Namelessness he once left all the inhabitants of a small city with no memory and the collective mind of a gopher. The ends of at least a dozen gods were linked to him. Towns were known to vanish from the earth when he was in the vicinity.”
Great, so this was my life. “Is this what you meant when you said he might as well have been a god?”
“The gods have restraint. We know it’s bad policy to foul your own nest.”
“Are you saying Iskendarian was known for being out of his mind? Even by comparison with you nutty gods?”
“That is probably not too strong a statement.”
I kneaded my temples with my hand. How much of this could I believe? After all, Gash was known as the master plotter of the gods. Could he be making all this up? From his reputation, absolutely. But why would he bother? How dangerous was Iskendarian? How dangerous did that make me?
Dangerous enough that I shouldn’t want to be alone with myself in a dark alley, it sounded like. Hell, dangerous enough not to be alone with myself, period. “Sounded like” didn’t even figure into it. I’d seen the evidence with my own eyes.
Except Gash wasn’t telling the truth; not the whole truth at any rate. He never did. So which part was he fudging on? Maybe I could ask Monoch. I’d better wait until I had him alone, though, and could feel him out a bit more. He might lie too, but perhaps I could triangulate on whatever it was they were trying to keep from me by coming at from another direction.
It made sense that Gash might be pulling his punches when illuminating Iskendarian and his activities. If Iskendarian was listening in - and was as touchy as Gash described - maybe Gash didn’t want to rub him the wrong way.
On the other hand, maybe that’s just what he did want to do -
“Are you trying to decide if it’s me listening to you here,” I shot at him, “or if it’s really Iskendarian? You think he might be awake after all and be using his puppet as a mask to hide behind?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Gash said. “Even though Monoch doubts it. Yet Monoch, of course, could have been co-opted.”
I glanced at Monoch, an innocuous walking stick still resting between my knees. Right. I had to keep remembering he was really a spy, and not one working for me, either. “And what have you decided?”
“It appears that you and Iskendarian are now, for certain practical purposes, different entities. Yet I am not convinced he is under your firm control, nor that you will be able to accomplish this.”
“There’s one basic answer to the problem. I could get killed,” I suggested.
“Can you think of anything more likely to wake Iskendarian up again than attempting to die? He may well be several hundred years old already - you think he doesn’t have safeguards? And do you think if Iskendarian could be safely wiped from the scene we gods would not have already brought this to pass? In a notorious manifesto, Iskendarian once declared that the world as we know it would not survive him.”
“Another reason folks were nervous when he dropped from the scene?”
“Just so.”
“But you say they won’t be any happier knowing he’s still around. No, I guess not. Doesn’t sound like a good situation, does it?”
“You begin to perceive the problem.”
“Yeah, right. Wait - how about this? If I can’t get killed, maybe I could kill myself.”
“An interesting twist,” Gash said. “But if you and Iskendarian are indeed separate intelligences, as you claim, don’t you think he would have precautions against you as well?”
“Huh. What about an exorcism? Maybe he could be driven out of me, so to speak.”
“This doesn’t appear to be a case of possession, per se. Of course, it is not a straightforward matter of multiple personalities, either. Some sort of exorcism might be something to try. On the other hand, this is Iskendarian. He could have contingency planning to deal with being driven from his body. Would you like to be responsible for delivering a free-floating autonomous Iskendarian spectre to the world? You may recall the activities of Pod Dall as he attempted to recorporate in Roosing Oolvaya.”
“For someone who may be out of his mind you sure think he’s figured all the angles.”
“Not necessarily all,” said Gash. “Even if he intended to insinuate himself into the company of gods, I don’t believe he would have planned for this level of close scrutiny. Also, judging by his rampage while he was in control earlier, subterfuge may no longer have been his goal. Of course, his actions do not quite make sense, either, which either means we have not yet seen enough to understand his plan, or,…”
“Or he’s out of his mind.” Our mind.
“Just so. So I have a proposal. I think perhaps you’d better stay with me.”
“You mean you actually stay somewhere? You don’t just zip off into thin air between one appearance and the next?”
Gash sighed and looked at me with exasperation. “I mean, more broadly, that you should remain in my company. Moves by Iskendarian that you could not counter on your own should evolve differently when you and I and Monoch are present.”
“You and I and Monoch?”
“And possibly others. To put it bluntly, which should not even be necessary, you are a walking time bomb. Since I’m aware of the danger, by rights I should be fleeing to the other side of the world.”
“Then why aren’t you?”
He fixed me with another stare. “If you detonate and the situation gets out of hand, the other side of the world may be far too close. Would you hibernate for fifty years and then reemerge for anything less than your major move?”
“Obviously not.” He was right. I was a public menace, a walking time bomb, whatever exactly that was.
Only could I trust him? Of course not, but that judgment was largely mitigated by the fact that I clearly couldn’t trust myself either. “So,” I said, “where are we going?”
Gash scowled, an expression I don’t think I’d ever seen on him before. “There is someone I believe it is time to see.”
“An ally? I thought you didn’t need allies, only tools, and ones to stab in the back as soon as you were through with them.” Come to think of it, since I’d known Gash, every associate of his I’d been aware of had met a nasty end.
“Misdirection is often the strongest ally there is. And I didn’t say this person was an ally, either, except potentially of convenience.”
But what choice did I have? At the moment, none were apparent. If I’d said no to his proposal would he have let me leave the coach, whatever his warnings about Iskendarian and his potential defenses against harm? Somehow I didn’t think so. And could I approach any of the Karlini gang at this point, after exterminating a key member they were all fond of? No, at the moment it was time to ride and think, and hope some additional options would present themselves somewhere down the line.
Rather than just cruising the streets, it seemed that the coach had already been following particular instructions from Gash. We had reached a reasonably high-class section of Peridol, actually one of the streets of the gods judging by the constant parade of temples marching past at either hand. If Gash wanted allies, it seemed like a reasonable place to look. Instead of pulling up in the front somewhere, though, the coach stopped midway between two medium-sized worship houses just long enough for Gash to hustle me out of the vehicle and down the narrow alley that separated the buildings. I didn’t know if he intended to insure that I couldn’t make out the sigils of the owning gods above the grand entranceways, but the result was the same; I had a quick glimpse of a basilica front to the right and the minarets of a mosque on the left, and then we were scurrying down the walk-space brushing the walls with our shoulders on either side. Truth to tell, I was feeling less like scurrying than like falling into a bed and not emerging for a week. In my recent history with Iskendarian I’d taken more damage than I was eager to itemize. Momentum was probably the thing; all I needed to do was just keep myself moving, was the thought on my mind, when Gash abruptly stopped ahead of me and I had to pull up sharply to keep from bowling him over. “Here, I believe,” he murmured, passing his hand lightly over the stones of the basilica wall, then moving slowly away from me down the alley. For a moment I thought he was working some magic, as his hand seemed to sink into a stone, but then I saw that the stone itself was sinking into the wall under the pressure of his touch. He manipulated several other adjoining stones similarly. Not surprisingly, this was followed by a narrow section of wall swinging silently away from us. We squeezed into the passage and the secret door closed behind our backs.
The passage was narrow and twisty and apparently built within the internal walls of the building. It was also apparent that Gash knew where he was going, but that neither he nor anyone else had taken this route recently, judging from the dust and the evidence of heavy infestation by rodents and spiders and the other usual tenants of such places. Several times Gash paused in consideration at branch points, selecting one path over another in what I assumed was not a succession of random hunches. He took none of the exit doors and utilized none of the covered peepholes, however, until finally he held up a hand. The green wizard-glow ball that drifted ahead of him shrunk to a pinpoint and went out. I could see Gash pulling aside a wall-hanging curtain, however, in the glow that came through the silvery window it revealed in the wall. I had already begun to think we might not be expected. “After you,” whispered Gash, fingering the window and transforming it into a waving sheet of gossamer eddies. I stretched out my own hand. Since I felt only a cool whisper as of the memory of an oil bath, I stepped through the mirror. Beyond the mirror was a person, her hands raised in a complex ward but her mouth open in surprise. “You! -” she said. “What have you -”
But her surprise was not yet over; in fact, knowing her as I did, it was clear the surprises had just begun. I had to admire him, even if he had tried hard to get me killed and hadn’t necessarily given up yet on that goal. She was looking over my shoulder now, at the figure emerging behind me, and her eyes were wide now and her face white, too. “You! - you? - but I -
you -”
“Hello, Jill-tang,” said Gash, her husband.