“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.
CHAPTER 3
“This is not what I expected,” said a voice some distance away in the darkness; that of the Imperial Archivist.
“That’s rather a characteristic of my family, I’m afraid,” Zalzyn Shaa called back. As long as any guards weren’t interfering, why not converse? And if they did interfere, that could provide its own entertainment anyway. “What did you expect?”
“... I’m not sure, really. Torture, I suppose, possibly rape, more grandstanding certainly. I didn’t expect to be just parked in a dungeon while your brother left to attend to other business.”
“Well, I’m sure he intends to get to all of that in good time. He’s bound to be rather stretched thin at the moment, though, wouldn’t you think? Seeing as he’s just promoted himself to god, and all.”
“Right,” said Leen, “so he’s a god now. When you’ve just become a god what do you do next?”
“Aside from anything you want? When you’re Arznaak, probably the greatest amount of harm to the greatest number of people.”
Leen said nothing back to that. It was the sort of thought to inspire contemplation, not that they had any shortage of those. Shaa, in the momentary reverie that had sustained him as they were being dragged down to the subbasement to be dumped in the dungeon, had amused himself with the metaphorical image of the lot of them being swept inexorably into the maw of a huge maelstrom, the current at the funnel’s rim being initially so gentle as to be unrecognized, then the insistence of the moving water and its motive force becoming notable and inescapable at virtually the same moment. Now an aerial observer would find them spread out along the funnel’s sloping wall, each individually thrashing to keep head above water but simultaneously subsiding toward the common drain, when they would presumably all meet again in a common crashing fate. At the moment, his fate and that of the Archivist were the most tightly intertwined, of course, but Shaa preferred to think globally wherever possible. It was a certainty that, although presently out of sight, Max, the Karlinis, the Monts, the Creeping Sword, his brother Arznaak, his sister Eden, and who knew how many others were bound together in a common skein.