His head turned slowly to face me, and his eyes gazed sharply through mine. “You may not know what I am. As for who I am … you may call me Gashanatantra.”
What the heck, I would see how far I’d come. “Okay, sure. That’s a fine name unless I need to call you in a hurry. Since you say this mess is so urgent, I’d rather call you something I don’t have to figure out how to pronounce every time I try to say it. How about Gash?”
“Gash. Indeed.” He paused again, and I prepared to die. Then, instead, he took another swallow from my flask, and said, “Very well. Are you prepared to begin now?”
“Yeah, I think so. Where can I get in touch with you?”
“I will be available when appropriate.”
“You said something like that once before.”
“As with the insurance investigation, I wish my role to remain as minimal as possible.”
“You mean I’m bait. You want to wave me around and have this barrier-maker shoot at me.”
He smiled. “You may view it that way,” he said, “if you choose.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I understand the situation, and that’s my job. There’s just one thing you might want to remember. You might want to remember that it’ll be more difficult for me to do what you need me to do if I’m dead. That means it’s also in your own interest that I don’t get that way.”
“Few mortals are irreplaceable. I have selected you so that you can accomplish this on your own, by yourself.” He paused, his eyes momentarily wandering over to look at the other shield, the one from Mangotchka hanging over the desk. This one had a different, neater hole punched straight through the middle where a javelin had once gone through it. The javelin was still embedded behind it in the wall. “Do you think you can handle it?”
Every client I’d ever had ended up asking that, sooner or later. I hadn’t answered honestly yet; I usually needed the business. “I’m not dumb enough to say no, but I’m not dumb enough to say yes. You’re a big-time player. So is whoever’s out there, even if he isn’t a god. He’s probably going to be a nasty nut to crack. That may need the kind of firepower that you’ve got and I don’t. That means if I get in trouble that’s too deep for me on my own I’m going to have to count on you to back me up.”
He didn’t say anything, he just eyed me again and then got up and left. I had the nasty feeling I might find out how expendable I really was. One thing that he carefully hadn’t said, though, and that I hadn’t wanted him to know I’d thought of, was this metabolic linkage bit. I’d die if he died, he had said, but maybe it would work the other way too. It was just possible that he’d have to bail me out, for the sake of his own skin, or else cut me loose. I wasn’t planning to die, but I was planning to get out of this thing without him running the rest of my life. It would be trickier than anything I’d done before, but for some reason I thought I might actually be able to pull it off. Don’t ask me why I was so optimistic. There hadn’t been much in my morning so far to justify a sanguine view of the prospects.
And of course, things were about to get worse.
Like I said before, I hate magic. It makes me nervous.
I’m sure that kind of feeling was an old story. Back thousands of years ago, when technology ruled the world, I’m sure some people hated that too. When the gods moved in and shut technology down, the big thing that changed was the emphasis. These days technology had acquired a mystique among the few people who knew it had ever existed, a nostalgia that I shared. Nostalgia was all it would ever be. Every time some new mechanical genius showed up, trying to roll out a new innovation or reintroduce an old one he’d dug out of a ruin, the gods would squash him. They kept an eye out for things like that, and they didn’t miss much.
More to the point, though, just because I didn’t like the idea of magic didn’t mean I couldn’t know something about it, or know some of the people who knew how it worked. In my business, every friend is a blessing, and every contact an asset. When I’d pulled myself together, then, having decided not to actually finish off the flask at that time, I headed off to see a guy. This person certainly wasn’t a blessing, but in the past he had been an asset, and in my present jam I hoped I could convince him to be one again.
Carl Lake took one look at me, after his manservant had ushered me into his comfortable second-floor solarium atop the silversmith’s shop on the fashionable Street of Fresh Breeze, and said, “What happened to you?”
I seated myself in his down-stuffed armchair in the shade of a tropical young-palm. Gash hadn’t told me I shouldn’t tell anybody else the real situation, but I figured I’d better be discrete. “I got a client,” I said.
He pushed aside some scrolls on his desk, the polished surface gleaming with rare hardwoods, and leaned over it to peer more closely at me. “You have also picked up a curse.” He scrutinized the air around me. “I’ve never seen one quite like this - beautiful work, beautiful work. Unregistered, hmm, yes.”
“Unregistered?” I said. “What the hell does that mean? And what’s this about a curse?”
“Surely you know of the curse registry?” he said, steepling his fingers. “Curses are often registered with an agency of the gods. Like insurance, hmm? A god is contracted to administer the application of the curse. Supervision by a god, a very valuable function, yes, but quite expensive.” He clucked to himself and rubbed his eyebrows. His eyebrows, possibly because of the attention, stuck wildly up and down like ragged bottlebrushes. “The curse is woven in your aura, like this -” His hand made swooshing darting movements around his own body. “What are the details, what is its purpose - without a full study I cannot tell.” He spread his arms, hands open and palms up.
Well, I guess I could have told him the story, how this curse was probably how Gash had linked my fate to his, but I didn’t. I’d met Carl after he’d gone on a picnic a short way up the river. Three thugs had thrown him off a rock ledge and left him for dead, and had stolen the scrolls he’d taken along to read in the sun. I’d tracked down the goons and recovered his stuff. Carl would never walk right again, since the ledge had been fairly high up, but he still had his solarium and a good basic stay-at-home fee-for-spell magical consulting business, so he was doing all right. Sometimes he let himself feel some obligation to me. He’d also invested more attention in learning more reliable self-protection magic. “Well,” I said, “so I’ve got a curse, what else is new? I guess I’ll just have to live with it. What’s going on in town?”
“Aside from the martial law and the curfew and the troops, yes, anything going on you say?”
“Aside from them, yeah. Any strange new magic around?”
“You,” Carl said, “I know. You are testing me. You have some particular thing in mind you are really asking me. Yes, hmm?”
“You think?”
“Something magical, then. Hmm.” He rang for tea, and I remembered what time it really was, still barely the hour for a civilized breakfast. Carl was still in his dressing gown, but of course magicians had their own reputation to keep up, conjurations past midnight and all that. The tea was hot and its taste alive with the tingle of exotic spices, one of the benefits of living in a major commercial port. “Good tea,” I said.
“Yes, thank you. You are not interested in simple gossip, but then these are not simple times, hmm? As you know, I am not often political, but perhaps you have come for speculation on political trends?”
I decided to stop playing games; maybe then he’d stop too. “Look, Carl,” I said, “maybe it’s political and maybe it’s not. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. I’ve heard that somebody’s put a barrier around the city, and I don’t mean a line of troops. A barrier for quarantine, and neutralization of surveillance.”