What a group.
Their conversation was not without interest, though. “When I find out who is responsible for all this,” the former Lion was saying, “I will slice them up in little ribbons.”
Karlini’s voice was thin but had a tendency to fade even further in spots, and his lolling eyes, when their lids opened, were shot through with red. “Well, let’s see. There’s Arznaak, that’s obvious enough, but it’s clearly a simplification to say the responsibility was his alone. If it weren’t for Max, say, and his ongoing plots and stratagems, Arznaak would have had to do things in an entirely different way; Maximillian gave Arznaak his major opening, shall we say. And then there’s Arznaak’s brother - he could have killed Arznaak when he was little, before any of them knew what a scapula was. That would have saved everybody some trouble, you can bet. Roni - can’t forget Roni. Without her irresponsible experimentation things would have gone so far and no further, right? But as long as we’re talking irresponsible experiments, there’s Byron, or the Creeping Sword or whoever he is - I guess you’d have to say he’s responsible because he helped start the whole system of the gods in the first place.
“And we haven’t even started in on the gods themselves. Gashanatantra with his plots - well, if he hadn’t had the plan to trap Pod Dall in the ring, the wheel would have never gotten rolling, and Arznaak would never have had the essential step up from using the ring’s power to smite Jardin. Jardin, Jill-tang, Vladimir the Storm Lord and his tool Fradjikan - you want me to go on? Can’t forget you, either. If you hadn’t ruined the alliance between us and the Hand we might have been able to head off Arznaak before his master stroke. Right?”
“You mean there’s no one person responsible? Everyone is responsible - including me?”
“Why don’t we just say there’s plenty of blame to go around,” said Karlini.
“I like to have someone to blame,” the Lion said ominously.
Karlini might have shrugged, or it might have been only another spasm. “What can you do? You want somebody to blame? If it’ll make you feel better just pick someone; there’s plenty of suspects around. Why not pick - why not pick him!” And suddenly Karlini was on his feet, his eyes open and glaring, his arms reaching forward like hooks, as ahead of them at the end of the aisle, fresh from his session with his oracle, appeared Byron.
“You!” said the Great Karlini. In an instant, all awareness of whatever he’d been talking about and the people around him and the situation still evolving outside seemed to slip from him, as he came off the floor with his hands clawing up in what was clearly about to be a mad attack aimed at separating me from whatever lives I still possessed. When I had seen him down the aisle after emerging from the computer room I had realized this was not necessarily the smartest thing I could have done, to have confronted him directly without first preparing the ground by dispatching an emissary or making certain he was firmly immobilized, but on the other hand I rather thought facing up to actions to whose responsibility I had fallen heir was an appropriately self-abasing move, in the wake of so much trickery and deception.
Of course, that didn’t mean I had to just sit back and let him take me apart, either, and I did have news that might somewhat mitigate the nastiest of the things he had to hold against me. I opened my mouth to speak, but the sword got there first. “Karlini!” it said, as usual in my mind but also, it was reasonable to suppose, in his as well. And even proceeding directly to the brain as the utterance did, the “sound” of the voice was one that was thoroughly familiar to him.
“What did you say?” Karlini spat. “It wasn’t enough you murdered her, now you have to play games with me as -”
“I’m not dead, dear,” said the sword, at the same moment as I said “She’s not dead, Karlini!” out loud. “Not exactly, at any rate,” the sword added.
Karlini’s mouth moved but no sound came out. Then, “Roni?” he squawked, trying again. “You’re in his sword? What are you doing in there?”
“Taking a vacation,” said the sword.
Karlini, in his agitated state, probably missed it, but to me that remark had sounded less of offhand flippancy than might have been expected. “That’s great!” said Karlini, teetering on his feet again with the look of someone about to fall on his backside on the ground. His voice had the character of someone getting intoxicated as quickly as possible on whatever was available; air, in this case. His eyes were glazing. “That’s great! - all we have to do is build you a new body-”
“Cloning may be a possibility,” I inserted, in an undertone.
“- a new body, I know you wouldn’t want to take over somebody else’s, so a new body, and then we pry you out of the sword, and, and -”
“I am taking,” the sword repeated, more firmly, “a vacation. I find I rather like it in here. It is surprisingly peaceful, being separated from one’s autonomic nervous system.”
“Not to mention adrenal hormones,” Shaa murmured. I hadn’t seen him edge up, but he had evidently included himself in the sword’s conversational range as well.
“But -” said Karlini. “But -” His arms were waving in front of him now, no longer in readiness for attack, but as though he was trying to figure out how one went about hugging a sword or throwing oneself at its feet. I was used to it by now, but of course the sword was flaming, too, albeit a bit less flamboyantly than when the Monoch personality had been the only active tenant, and was exerting its habitual torque on my wrist.
“Here,” I told Karlini. “The two of you work this out.” I thrust the sword - calling it Monoch didn’t seem either appropriate or accurate anymore - toward him, presenting the hilt for him to grasp. When he had done this, and had been flung to the ground on his side as the sword’s bucking-bronco heft typically tried to establish who was boss, I moved quickly back out of range.
Shaa, never to be one to ignore the actions of others when they smacked of prudence through foreknowledge, had retreated with me. “So,” he said. “What do you think?”
“About the Karlinis? I wouldn’t begin to guess. As far as I know I still have never been married.”
“Actually,” said Shaa, “while that matter is clearly of more than passing interest, I was primarily wondering about the state of the world outside.”
“Well,” I said. “For anyone fond of the old order, or of civic order in general I suppose, the situation is fairly apocalyptic. I wouldn’t venture to guess at casualty figures, and in any case it would have to be a guess since the Scapula’s pulse and the stuff that’s breeding as a result have pretty much demolished any hope of decent communications. It looks like most of the gods are gone, and most of the high-level magic users are gone, and things magical are just generally out of control, but a lot of that I imagine will die down over the next few days or weeks. Of course, there’s fallout - a bunch of potion discharges that seem to be raining sorcerously active byproducts , some really substantial explosions in the army weaponry stores, free phantasms and toxic specters wandering the streets - but the big one is what’s loose from the Karlini lab, of course.”
A general hubbub broke out at that. Before things degenerated into a morass of told-you-so’s, however, I raised my voice to try to override them all and keep them focussed. “Yes,” I hollered, “it looks like an out-and-out plague, but leave the recriminations for later, okay? There’s already an outbreak of transfiguration in Blind Park just downwind, folks bursting into flame or melting into goo, strange discharges -”