So that was the way it was going to be. Yahlei’s attacker had now appeared through the floor himself, the sword in his hand wearing its power like a blaze of fiery pearls. Max popped the next dart into the blowgun. He was deciding whether to go after Yahlei again or switch to the new complication when it abruptly became apparent that the new guy and his sword were not in agreement on what they were doing. The sword was straining toward Oskin Yahlei, but the man had gotten his left arm braced under it and was trying to force it out of the way and into the floor. Through the rain of sparks, Max could see the muscles standing out on the guy’s arm and neck, his teeth were clenched, and his face was turning red with blood, but the sword was going to win.
It was one of those lousy overmuscled enchanted swords with half a mind of its own, and all of that mind was bent on drinking blood and devouring flesh. It’s going to get it, too, Max thought disgustedly, so goodbye Oskin Yahlei. That wasn’t the only goodbye - Max was sure this was just the kind of situation the Death in the ring loved: hacking, pain, destruction. He would be coming awake. As long as the ring stayed on Yahlei’s finger, though, he couldn’t get out, and with a little luck the confinement spells Max had ready could calm him back to quiescence. Max dropped the blowgun and made a pass with his hand, fluttering his thumb painfully over his wrist. The blue spirals of the first spell took shape over Oskin Yahlei’s head.
Yahlei spoke, his voice little more than a wet rattle. “You are not Gashanatantra,” Max heard.
The other guy’s response was even fainter, but Yahlei was facing away while the guy was pointed straight in Max’s direction so the words carried toward him. “No,” the man said, “and you weren’t Death, either, so maybe that makes us even.”
Oh, no, Max thought, not Gashanatantra, is he around too? If this guy was tied up with him, there was no telling what he might do. In fact, Max realized suddenly, there was telling what he might do, the idiot. The sword pulled free from the floor panel that had caught it up and dug deep into Oskin Yahlei. Oskin Yahlei stiffened, the black aura rising off his skin like a hardening shroud. The man leaned forward over him.
Max was on his feet and around the desk, yelling desperately, “Don’t touch that ring!”, his hands making frenzied passes and the blue confinement framework dropping toward the floor. The guy didn’t hesitate. He lurched forward, grabbed Yahlei’s finger, seized the ring, and pulled.
The ring came free in his hand. A long yellow filament of lightning jumped from Oskin Yahlei’s finger to the ring and squirmed for an instant in the air, smoke curling up from both the finger and the ring. A ripple washed through the black aura, starting at the finger and spreading in a quick expanding circle across the surface of Yahlei’s body, as though the aura was shaking itself loose from the skin. The blue confinement grid locked into place around Oskin Yahlei. The grid had assumed a lozenge shape formed of small faceted planes, each flat surface circulating with whirlpool whorls, one face now folding outward to encompass the ring; tiny fuzzy marbles glowing with blues and greens separated themselves from the inside surface of the grid and began to bounce around the interior. The matrix closed on the guy’s arm.
The man still had the sword in one hand and the ring in the other. Neither object was quiet - a web of silver electricity centered on the ring had enveloped his left hand, illuminating the bones with each coiling flash, and the sword held the other hand tight in its grip as it fed on the flesh of Yahlei. Max ground to a halt and started madly throwing power into the grid, trying to stabilize it, pushing the next spell in the series to release. The reaching appendage of matrix touched the other man’s skin. Then - at the circle of contact - a sudden ZZZZ-NAPP!, a powerful on-and-off flash of incendiary blue! A backlash surge quivered across the matrix and caught Max in its force and threw him away from the stairs into the desk; the edge of the field at the surface of the guy’s arm swelled, turned white, and shattered. Tumbling white shards cascaded down.
Max reeled back up and gestured again. What the hell had happened there? He sent a quick probe at the guy, at the guy’s aura. The aura was - huh? It was multiplexed. The man’s own aura was overlaid and interwoven with the master-wave and a set of locklines and some other stuff he couldn’t immediately recognize from the aura of somebody else, from a somebody else he did indeed recognize. So that’s where Gashanatantra comes into it, Max thought, new possibilities flickering through his mind.
But the end of the matrix field was still open and the black aura was up to something. From a look at the guy’s aura, the matrix would never be able to lock together in its strongest configuration, through his skin - the aural lines were too strong. Max hurled a modifier string. hoping the matrix would hold long enough to encase Oskin Yahlei and the ring and the other guy too. The black aura was a molting sheath of smoky vellum seen through the surface of the blue lozenge, gathering itself for a move. A new shaft of lightning ripped from Yahlei’s finger toward the ring, and then the sheet of aura flowed off his body and down the thunderbolt in a smooth wave. The lightning darkened, the aura drew itself in, condensing and growing more solid as it arched out, and the force of the leading edge of the aura slammed dead center down the bore of the golden ring.
WHOOOOMM!! A blaze of electric white winked out from the ring. The floor shook, things fell off the shelves, even the heavy desk jumped up and hopped a foot back as the light fogged out vision like a sudden thick cloud. Max dimly saw the form of the guy fling out its arms and hurtle backward down the staircase, all the color washed from his body and his front stained boiling white. The sword pulled free from Oskin Yahlei and flew after him, beginning to spin end-over-end as it left his hand, but the ring held stationary in the air, its spinning glow visible even through the haze of Max’s flash-blindness. Max staggered back against the desk, fighting to stay on his feet in the pounding shockwaves. The confinement matrix was in shreds. His second- and third-order vise-clamp spells were fighting their way toward the ring but were already losing force; they’d never make it on their own.
A black funnel spun out of the other side of the ring. It was the black aura, passing into the ring as a solid tube and fanning into a vortex as it left. Tracers of force leapt from the walls toward the vortex, each giant spark making the cloud pulse red or yellow or green from its interior radiating out, and sending lines of light whipping around the surface like barrel hoops. Max grabbed control of the third confinement spell, fed it a new shot of power from his metabolic reserve, and squeezed. The spell turned a brighter blue and tightened on the ring. The tube of inflowing black began to narrow, Max gritted his teeth and fed again, blue flashed, and a corkscrew kink grew in the tube as the spell dug in further, fragments of black flaking off like spray from an ocean breaker. The vortex was now the height of the room, surrounded by expanding shock-spheres bursting like bubbles, silver and orange and blue, but in the midst of it something physical was taking shape. There was little doubt what that was, or rather, who. The form of the trapped Death was coming through.
Max held the confinement field steady and began to concentrate on the link-phrases that would call up his new coupling spell, the one he’d used to fight the eye of Oskin Yahlei with Karlini back at the castle; if he swung out with that kind of hyperenergetic slug, it should be good enough to knock even a Death into a manageable state. The coupling intermediary unfolded itself, a concave burgundy-colored plate with moving tendrils on its back floating in the air over the desk; the plate split into its four smaller replicas, and –