That was not, in fact, far from the case. “Enough, already!” Max yelled at the bird. “Get us out of here!”
But instead the bird pulled up in the air, laid its wings back, and dove toward the head of the Corpus, its talons extended toward the thing’s goggling eyes.
“Two can play at this game,” I said. My words were perhaps robbed of their full impact, though, by the fact that my face was being ground into the floor by the chair that had ended up resting on my back with one of my arms wound through its understructure. One of my legs was trailing upward and it felt like my foot had become wedged somehow into the workstation’s desk keyboard surface. Someone was moaning, too, but for a change it wasn’t me; it sounded like a suddenly asthmatic Favored. When the Scapula’s sorcerous tidal wave had hit, it had scrambled me to a fair-thee-well and shot my voluntary muscle control out from under me, but it had slammed into Favored with the impact of multiple hits from a rapid-fire crossbow. He’d gone down in a spasmodic heap and was now huddled under the neural-interface couch.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen or heard anything from Haddo and Wroclaw, either.
I couldn’t admire the Scapula’s methods, or Favored’s either, for whatever contribution to this mess had been his responsibility. Overloading the subcarrier channel through sheer excess was the solution of a brute with power to waste; scorching everyone who was expressing mitochrondial genes for magical latency was downright genocidal. It might be literally genocidal in the case of the nonhuman species, all of whom had the extra magic organelles woven into their cellular ultrastructure more as root constituents than the add-ons more characteristic of magic-capable humans. No, there were more refined ways to pound the world back to its pre-magical days. The genetic code was there to command lysozyme resorption of the magic organelles. For that matter, there was a targeted oncogene, too, and an autoimmune solution one of my associates had launched by retrovirus a few hundred years ago; it should certainly be established in the population by now. And -
- and I realized I was thinking about elegant and subtle ways to launch my own apocalypse that would put the Scapula’s to shame. That shouldn’t be necessary, though, at least to target anyone other than the Scapula himself. Even in that direction it might not be necessary. It might have been my imagination, but I’d thought the Scapula’s pulse was going to keep on building instead of experiencing the abrupt decay and trough that had sucked me back into full awareness. Had my modifications to the Scapula’s Iskendarian virus turned him into a living example of rigor mortis? Had someone else with paralytic intent made it to him first? Was he trying to suck in any counterattacks? Had he just burned out prematurely?
On the other hand, even if it was a question of choosing between subduing the Scapula or leaving him free to rampage again, I didn’t know if I would try to use any of these tools that might be available to me. With the effect of the Scapula’s blow still reverberating through the system who knew what might go awry; I could set loose a chain reaction that wouldn’t stop until it had consumed... well, a lot, if not everything.
Even if the infrastructure wasn’t messed up that could still happen.
But in any case the first thing to do was get my head back on the right side of my feet, and see if the workstation systems had come back enough to tell me what was going on. It was not quite as easy to do as say, however, for not only was my arm wound around the chair, both arm and chair were entwined with the walking stick Monoch, whom I was still wearing slung sidelong down my back. Maybe Favored would finish reviving himself in a timely enough hurry to be able to give me a hand. He was seeming more alive, anyway,even though what I could see of his skin through the chair appeared unnaturally wet and was sporting an unpleasantly greenish slime, and he was bubbling bright red froth through his nose and mouth during his respiration. He seemed to be mumbling, “Gotta change my name, gotta change my name,” too.
“Favored!” I said.
One eye cracked open and swam blearily in my direction, completely injected with red. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he gurgled.
He wasn’t going to be of much use, that was clear. I didn’t want to try any sort of conjuration, either, even though I still felt tingly and invigorated from the Scapula’s rapid-grow treatment, since on the one hand I didn’t know what eddy loops and feedback circuits might be left in the system, either inadvertently or as deliberate mop-up weapons planned by Arznaak, and on the other hand I hadn’t really shaken my anti-magic bent, whether it had been inculcated in me by Iskendarian or not. I thought it was past time to be trying things just to see what might happen.
There was a scrabbling sound behind the viewing-gallery window and a greenish clawing hand rose into view, followed by the sagging face of Wroclaw. If I kept craning my neck around to see what was going on while my nose and cheek still remained in intimate contact with the floor, though, I might end up frozen in an even more unnatural position with no one but myself to blame for the crowning touch. I tried again to lever myself up from the floor with my free hand, simultaneously using my elevated leg as a pivot point to roll over to the side and tip the chair away from my back. This time I yanked with my entwined arm too, and between everything the chair slid free and crashed over onto the floor.
“Ow!” said the wincing Favored, covering his ear with his arm.
“Who was that?” I said.
“That was me,” muttered Favored. “I was -”
“No, I thought I heard somebody new trying to clear their throat, or maybe just making one of those rattly noises down in their chest. There it is again.”
A limp blackish dishrag had joined the wilted Wroclaw at the viewing window, but it hadn’t seemed like the kind of sound Haddo would make, anyway.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Favored was saying, with surprising sharpness for all his woebegone appearance.
“Shut up and let me listen,” I told him. I had gotten my leg free, too, in the process of relieving myself of the chair, and was sitting up on the floor with my back to the main console while I tried to get my bearings. But now I thought someone was saying, faintly and in a creaky voice, “Where am I and what am I doing here?”
“Anybody hear anything that time?” I said.
They all shook their heads, no. Was Iskendarian back? That was clearly the fear in Wroclaw’s saggy-lidded eyes, at least, and with the shower of prodigies abroad in the land right at the moment the prospect could not be thoroughly discounted. But I -
Then I realized this voice was not the only new message impinging on my senses. There was a band of heat running diagonally down my back, heat accompanied by a tingling thrumming quiver, all these sensations coinciding with the position Monoch in his walking stick form currently occupied. I reached up and back and pulled him loose.
“What am I doing here?” said Monoch, now coming through much more clearly as I grasped his handgrip. “Where am I?” But - leaving aside for a moment the fact that the sword had never actually spoken before - that voice certainly didn’t sound like any voice I’d have thought Monoch would use. It didn’t sound like the voice of a sword at all; it was altogether too pleasant, that and too thoroughly female, too. It was also quite possibly a voice that was not exactly unfamiliar to me. In fact, it sounded like -