But I knew his audience, and I knew that with that one tantalizing insinuation he’d caught some of them.
My options were shrinking, not that they’d been wonderful to begin with. I could burst through the roof with the temperamental sword whirling and try to cut Oskin Yahlei down before he had a chance to blast me. If I was going to try that, I’d have to hope for a hand from the crowd, and at the moment I thought some of them would rather side with him over me. The best I could hope for under that scenario would be the magicians fighting among themselves. It was also possible that even a distracted Yahlei wouldn’t drop his hold on them, and might even decide to drain one or two magicians for their quick energy fix. I could throw the sword and maybe manage to skewer him. I could also just keep on watching. If he left, I might be able to trail him home and take him by surprise, away from potential allies. “Don’t worry,” I told the sword, suddenly restive again, “I’ll feed you, I’ll feed you. Be patient.”
“On the other hand,” Oskin Yahlei went on, “there is a another potential way to proceed. I can simply crush and absorb you. Any one of you.” His one-eyed gaze settled on a small man on the settee. I didn’t know him. “You, perhaps.” The black aura intensified around the guy, seemed to settle into his skin, his eyes opened wide and the eyeballs rolled up behind his lids, cords stood out in his exposed throat, and without making a sound, he began to shrink inward like a collapsing wineskin. He turned sideways and slid to the floor, his muscles limp and diminishing. The colors of his own aura appeared, flowing out of his skin like shattering shards of glass, colors glinting and gone as they disappeared into the black.
At the right limit of my vision, half hidden behind a palm frond, I glimpsed a sudden quiver of motion. One of the other magicians in back of Oskin Yahlei was raising an arm. I couldn’t see who it was, only the slowly lifting arm, but I did abruptly see that the misty black coating on that side of the room had decreased, probably with Oskin Yahlei’s diversion of effort. The walking stick started to hum. “No!” I thought at it, and then another idea I hadn’t considered popped into my mind. “Let’s try this one, Monoch.”
How had I done whatever I’d done before, in the jail cage? COLLAPSE, I thought, concentrating at the floor of the solarium. The guy next to the settee now resembled a rotten gourd with the insides being sucked out of it. COLLAPSE! “Come on here,” I muttered at the sword, “give me a hand.”
The arm of the magician behind the palm tree was gradually coming into line with Oskin Yahlei’s back. I didn’t know if the sword understood what I was trying and had my doubts whether it could help even if it did, but for some reason my projected concentration began to sharpen and gain force, like an image through a spyglass brought suddenly into focus. COLLAPSE! I thought, my whole mind wrapped around the reality of the boards peeling back beneath Yahlei’s feet to fling him deep down into the earth. Oskin Yahlei’s black aura had intensified with the transfusion of fresh energy and the ring on his hand was glowing. He smacked his lips, then kicked the shrunken heap on the floor. “That is the alternative,” he said in a conversational tone. “I give you all your own free choice. Join me or -”
Green lines had begun to form around the outstretched hand of the magician behind Oskin Yahlei. Oskin Yahlei, still talking, had started to turn. Abruptly he froze, his brow furrowed, he looked up to scrutinize the ceiling, his gaze tracking across the solarium hides toward my eyehole behind the palm tree, the tracers of green in the magician’s hand grew together, I thought COLLAPSE, GODDAMMIT! as vividly as I could, and -
The building shuddered. Below in the solarium, a lamp on an ornate pedestal tipped over, spraying burning oil across the far wall. Oskin Yahlei took one step, the floor snapped up and hit his descending foot, and he dropped to one knee. Part of the roof right behind me fell in. A fiery green construct that looked like a set of flying meat hooks with smoke coming out the back zoomed over Oskin Yahlei’s head, banked just shy of the wall, and headed around for another pass. The building was groaning with the sound of grinding wood and disintegrating joints but the crowd in the room was still silent. Then the roof bounced again like someone had walloped the house with part of a small mountain, and as I looked back over my shoulder I was just in time to see the back of the building behind me, the one a floor taller than Carl Lake’s, detach itself from the rest of the structure, pause in mid-air, and surge toward me to collapse with full force against the house I was on.
A chimney hurtled over my head and plowed through the solarium’s hide roof. The hide ripped, a section of the canvas that had burst out in flames from the spilled lamp oil fell away over the side of the wall, and the whole building started to reel out over the Street of Fresh Breeze. I spread myself flat and clutched at the surface. Cries and pandemonium arose abruptly from the wreckage of the solarium: Oskin Yahlei had finally been distracted enough to relinquish his hold on the other magicians. The green meat hook again rose into view, looking tattered, started to dive back through the gaping hole in the roof, then halted indecisively. All at once it turned and headed straight for me. I rolled on my side, brought up the walking stick, trying to say Gash’s magic word the right way, and swung at the diving construct. The stick, refusing to change, merely waved in its direction. I threw myself onto my back and the hooks zoomed past my belly, gnashing angrily.
I was pretty angry myself. The roof beyond my feet abruptly caved in. I started sliding down the folding roof toward the hole as the green meat hook finished its turn and pointed itself at me again. I snapped at the disguised sword yet another time, but this time it listened. The walking stick melted its shape and burst into flame, my arm holding it tried to turn itself inside out, I flopped awkwardly to my left, propelled by the sword’s strange momentum, and at the last possible instant the blade of the sword danced out and passed straight through the twin green shafts holding the sharp meat cleaver spikes. The severed points shot off in diverging trajectories out of my sight like miniature javelins, the rear section, trailing lime-colored smoke, passed over my head and buried itself in a pile of broken boards, and the sword, now unleashed and hunting for more trouble, flung me away from the widening hole in the roof and toward the edge of the solarium.
Carl Lake’s house, in the deliberate process of turning itself into a pile of scrap lumber, lurched again and staggered further toward the street. One whole wall was now on fire. Ahead of me, in the wreckage of the solarium, roars, hisses, small explosions in the air, and sprays of multicolored light indicated that the local magicians were squaring off against someone, and potentially against each other too. In the second I had before hurtling over the edge of the roof to join them, straining to wrestle the sword down and say the word to deactivate it, I did manage to catch a glimpse of a neat rain shower condensing out of the air over the fire; that seemed a sign that Flora was okay, anyway. “Ki’tonk’ta-ah’,” I gasped, the sword, which seemed to be getting crabbier every time we did this, began to change back, and I hit the lip of the roof on a line running across my lower ribs. My arm flailing the walking stick came around in a fast arc under the force of my fall. Chest and arms and head were sticking out over the wrecked solarium, looking down at the dented palm tree leaning against the wall, I scrabbled with my free hand and fended off with the stick, and then just as I had decided I’d actually managed to retain my balance I spotted a crumpled form, its hands clasped over its head, huddled in the space underneath the tree.