Phlinn Arol gazed back. Did he nod, or was it merely the act of steadying himself on his cane? Then he turned and made his own exit.
An unseen guard dogged the heavy door shut behind them. In fact, the two visitors were the only people Max had seen since he’d been implanted in the cell. Did they credit him with a basilisk stare too? The ability to impart with the merest glance instant hypnotic commands?
But there were far more important things to worry about. What had really been on Phlinn Arol’s mind? If Phlinn knew Max, Max also knew him. He was badly preoccupied with something, and Max didn’t think it was merely whether Max had gotten himself hooked up with terrorists. It was something he obviously didn’t want to air with the Emperor-designate standing there listening to the entire exchange. They had been focusing on the action on the bridge, and the role of the ring, but -
What if Phlinn Arol hadn’t been just referring to the ring? ‘What you may have helped to set loose’ - ‘already enough destabilizing influences in circulation’ - what had Phlinn been thinking of? More than Arznaak?
What was happening at the lab?
CHAPTER 5
A small group of people stood with their mouths open, their heads bent slightly as they stared at something on the ground between them. “There goes another one down,” said Fire Chief Cinder, nudging the collapsed form of the Great Karlini with one foot. He transferred his gaze up toward Jurtan Mont, and then next to him at Tildamire Mont. “Any of you folks ready to try whatever he was fixing to do?”
A hot whoosh! roiled up from the side. The three of them ignored it; it was just more of the Karlini laboratory building falling in on itself. If they had bothered to spare a glance, however, they would have noticed a curious spectacle within the smoke and flames. For a moment the flames and smoke themselves seemed to solidify into a regular gridwork construction, of three double pincer claws of fire reinforced by gray restraints of vaporous wire on a telescoping crane-like base, with the claws clamping themselves shut around the tallest piece of standing wall and yanking at it until it fell toward them in cascading fragments that ripped the claws back into coiling streamers of disorganized fire and the crane mount into a curling geyser and then a detached upward-breaking fireball; but that was clearly impossible, a purely random illusion of shifting shadow and light. “Not me,” said Jurtan. “Magic’s not my thing.”
Magic wasn’t his thing; Jurtan knew he couldn’t conjure the simplest effect to save his life. He wouldn’t even know where to start. Perhaps if he’d paid more attention while Tildy had been doing her exercises under the tutelage of Karlini’s wife he’d be equipped to make a try of it. But on the other hand...
On the other hand, the way Jurtan’s music sense operated often seemed like magic. What if it wasn’t merely like magic at all? Max and Shaa had commented that his music sense gave him capabilities that required the use of sorcery in others. So maybe there was something he could do. He’d put people to sleep before - why not a fire?
Yet there was no need to rush into the attempt. Quite the contrary. There were at least two magic-user professionals lying comatose on the street to attest to the potential hazards at hand here. Something was clearly out of the ordinary about this fire, not that one would expect anything different from a disaster associated with the likes of the Great Karlini. It was not necessarily surprising, therefore, that Jurtan gradually realized as he listened to whatever his internal accompaniment was trying to tell him about the conflagration that it also felt like something in the fire was watching him.
Fire Chief Cinder turned his attention from the youth staring blank-eyed at the engulfed building to the girl, and when she shrugged helplessly and shook her head he wiped them from his mind and strode back toward his forces. Even if he had seen the youth suddenly fumbling in his pocket, and then withdrawing with a triumphant flourish from the pocket a harmonica, it would have meant nothing to him, other than the fact that the youth might be yet another one of the breed of dangerous lunatics who often seemed to be the principal denizens of the Wraith District. It was prudent to spare enough attention to keep some track of the lunatics in the immediate vicinity, though, and Chief Cinder was nothing if not prudent. As a veteran, though, this cataloging rarely made itself felt at a level of full consciousness. The blond fellow a head taller than anyone else in sight making his way up the street at a pace faster than a trot, if less than a full-out run, and that with a side of crisped beef slung over one shoulder, for example, was worth at least a tick in the mental notebook. Not far away -
Something glinted in his peripheral vision, something fast, something above - a dull bronze sphere festooned with ... stuff, banking around the flames forty feet over his head but leaving its own trail of puffy smoke behind it. The flying thing spun around once on its axis, hesitated in the air, and swooped toward the ground, trailed by a squawking seagull. A gout of steam erupted from the matrix of vents in the ball’s underside, a set of spidery legs in a tripod configuration protruded, and then the machine was squatting on the pavement next to the fallen Karlini, temporarily obscuring him beneath the flowing billows of vapor. “Now this is what I call a mess,” said the ball.
The top of the vehicle pivoted back and the pointy-eared head of Favored-of-the-Gods emerged. “Who’s in charge here?” he demanded, just as the seagull, approaching from behind, pulled up sharply and slapped him across the head with its wing. Favored squawked in a tone much like the bird’s and fell abruptly from sight back into his sphere while the bird executed a much neater landing on Karlini’s chest and began fanning the fumes away from his face.
The clanging and clattering from within the vehicle subsided, and two hands’-worth of long spidery fingers reappeared grasping the lip of the hatch. They were followed again by the now considerably more annoyed face of Favored. “What the hell happened to him?” he snapped, looking over the side at Karlini and the gull. Fire Chief Cinder noted that the gnome, and for that matter his entire vehicle, smelled of smoke.
There was a lot of smoke around today in general. “Are you a magician?” Chief Cinder asked.
“Better than that,” snorted Favored. “A fire this hot should sterilize anything biological, but something in there’s still leaking energy anyway. What you got to worry about is whatever that stuff is dripping into the water table. Now here’s what the situation looked like on my overhead pass just now.”
Jurtan had stepped out of the way of the seagull and was humming carefully on the harmonica, trying to feel his way to the rhythm of the fire. Atop the fire’s heavy bass roar, though, querulous meandering snatches of melody kept twisting out of nowhere like a cloud of darting gnats. They could be associated with the licks of leaping flame, but then there was a chance they might really be related to something else instead. Roni had had those vats of magical organisms in the lab; surely the fire would have sterilized them to lifeless ash... but it did seem as though something was surviving most improbably in the midst of the furnace. Or beneath it, perhaps, somewhere in the basement?
Then suddenly Jurtan knew what the fire was playing, atonal and harsh though it was, and he began to lay his own groove down around it.
“If you make a drop with the fire-retardant chemical just as we hit it with our last water bomb,” Chief Cinder was telling Favored, “maybe we can -”
An insistent beeping erupted from inside the ball-vehicle. Favored ducked his head down, muttering. “What the hell is it this - wait a minute! That’s not bad, kid.” He popped back up, eyeing Jurtan across the pavement furiously jawing away now with his instrument. “Okay, Cinder, so let’s try the bomb and the - wait, this is even better - over here, you idiot!” Favored yelled down the street, standing up on the hatch rim and waving his arms vigorously. “What the hell took you so long?”