Karlini focussed on Shaa, his face drawn and lined. “Roni’s dead,” he said.
“Unequivocally?”
“Sounds that way,” said Karlini, totally without energy. “The Creeping Sword killed her.”
Shaa seated himself on the floor. “The Creeping Sword may not have been able to help himself. It appears he is also Iskendarian.”
Karlini stared blankly at him for a moment. Then he drew in breath for a deep shuddering sigh. “I can see there’s something here we’re going to have to think about. Can I get a drink of water?”
Karlini was not acting in the typical manner for one who had just required resuscitation with smelling salts, but then very little about the situation was normal. Shaa was rising to his feet to fulfill the request for water, which was the first traditional move Karlini had made since reawakening, when Karlini abruptly said, “I’m going to kill him anyway, you know.”
Shaa sat back down. “I thought you might be feeling that way. Don’t think me callous when I say that might be precipitate.”
“I wasn’t there to help her when she needed it. What else’s left for me now?”
“Honoring Roni by acting rashly would not have impressed her.”
“I’ll just have to be the one to worry about that. Are you arguing that because the personality we know wasn’t in control and this other personality, Iskendarian, was, I should hold the one we know blameless?” Karlini shrugged. “You kill one, you get the other one for free. Nothing to do about it.”
Did Karlini want his water or not? It might cool him off, but on the other hand there might not be a better time to try to work this through, and Shaa didn’t want to lose the flow. “You wouldn’t blame someone who was possessed. This is not materially different.”
“Okay, fine,” said Karlini, “I won’t blame him if you’d rather I not. I wouldn’t blame a rabid dog either. But I’d still have to kill it.”
“What about the argument for self-interest? We may yet need the man’s capabilities.”
“There’s no compromising with evil.”
“Of course there is,” Shaa said, “especially considering that no one ever has any idea how to define it. ‘I know it when I see it’ is an insufficient standard for executions.”
Karlini was starting to steam. “Why are you defending him? Do you see Roni here anywhere? Wasn’t she your friend and partner as much as any of us? Or are you just playing the contrarian for the hell of it, to drive me to want to kill you too?”
This was good, in principle. Under the ancient doctrine of transference, perhaps Karlini was starting to deflect his antagonism onto Shaa instead. Of course, it wouldn’t do to let this get out of hand. Karlini could be deadly enough in his own right that Shaa didn’t want to face him down unless he absolutely had to. Possibly a stern glare was what was called for here. “I seem to recall quite a lot of exertion on your own behalf when you were confined to a certain castle recently,” Shaa said pointedly. “We all helped you, at no little sacrifice and danger, you might recall as well, including the same gentleman you’re so ready to exterminate. He turned to us for help, too, did he not? Quite obviously we have failed him, or he would not now be in the situation of a runaway rogue. Perhaps he should be pressing his grievances against us rather than the other way around.”
“Are you out of your mind? Think about what you’re saying! These flights of rhetorical fancy are totally running away with you.”
Well, perhaps he had gone a bit too far. The usual method for managing such a patient would have been to humor him in his obsessions, especially so soon after suffering such a major shock. Karlini, however, tended toward the idée fixe. With him, it was better to try to head off a bad idea before it became wedged in his head than to wait and hope to dislodge it later. That didn’t mean he had to fall off the deep end in the process. Shaa raised his hand to hold back Karlini’s mad onslaught. “These may be extraordinary times. My major point was the danger of precipitate action. We may yet need the talents of every one of us, what with Max in prison and -”
“What?” said Karlini. “What about Max? And where have you been, anyway?
If all else fails, change the subject. “I too was locked up. Also, my curse is lifted.”
“... If that’s true, the bad news that has to go with it must be pretty bad.”
“My brother is a god.”
“Just like I said.”
“I will get your water,” Shaa stated, “assuming you still remember asking for it, and then I suggest we gather the troops for a brief session of bringing up to date. Hmm?”
This was accomplished, and remarkably quickly too, especially under the circumstances. “It is difficult to say which complication demands the most urgent response,” said Shaa, watching Karlini chug down another tumbler fresh from the jug. “The situation at the laboratory may bother me the most, because of the potential for cataclysm if anything survived the fire to escape into the environment. Especially given the manifestations at the scene. Especially since you, Great One, were unconscious and unable to make a hazard assessment before you left.”
“It wasn’t my fault, I was -”
“I didn’t say a thing about fault,” Shaa said severely, “which is in any case irrelevant to the central concerns. Wroclaw? Haddo? I know you two reprobates have expressed your own misgivings in this matter.”
Haddo was the one who spoke. “Said Favored vanished hazard was.”
Shaa raised an eyebrow. “Who is Favored? Perhaps he or she - or it - should be at this meeting too.”
As much as you could ever tell from Haddo’s tone of voice, he seemed annoyed with himself. As though he had let slip something better left unsaid? Any such inference was as usual helped not at all by a reading of his expression, which consisted of his typical cowl-droop and eye-spark drift. “Busy Favored-of-the-Gods is. Attends he meetings not.”
“Edifying,” Shaa said, “as always. Anyone else have something to say about this Favored?”
“Was he the one in the flying ball?” asked Jurtan Mont. “Little guy with pointy ears? He was dropping things on the fire from the air. Seemed like a friend of Haddo’s.”
“I’ve met him, too,” Karlini said reluctantly. “He’s a technologist on call to the gods. He’s got a nasty attitude. He thinks everything we’ve been doing should have been shut down, especially the work in the lab. If he’s satisfied that the lab’s been defanged I’d think that’s pretty solid assurance.”
Am I reassured? Shaa asked himself. No, he was not. There were too many new facts and new faces being thrown around here. “I want to meet this Favored, and I want a comprehensive probe run on the lab. I -”
“Since when are you leader?” said Karlini. “What happened to decisions by consensus?”
“You are in my apartment,” Shaa stated, and, directing his stare fully at Karlini, added, “plus I may be the only one of us whose thought processes at the moment are intact. And before we degenerate into a tit-for-tat of tort and retort may I remind you that the stakes on this are too great for error.”
“I’m getting a new doctor,” Karlini muttered.
“That is always your prerogative. I’ll have your records sent over.”
Shaa had had his eye on Tildamire Mont, who had been looking increasingly like a balloon about to burst. “What is happening here?” she shouted suddenly. “We should be working together, not going for each other’s throat. What would Roni think?”
Shaa made one of his ironic faces. “Roni would probably recall our standard mode of behavior, that being that after we have all spent too much time together we need to retreat to opposite ends of the continent or tear each others’ ears off. But this time that’s not an option we can afford. I nominate my brother for the problem of next greatest import. Does anyone want to challenge this assessment?”