But there was no help for it. That was Max down there.
The chains holding him to the wall had come apart but the manacles were still on his wrists. Shaa bent secondaries from the wild energy sheeting out of the temple, established a forcing function with a muttered sentence and a small sweep of his fingers, added the modifier for iron. Field lines formed over him in the air, intensified as they swung past his shoulders, glowing blue-green, and funneled like water through a ruptured dam into the manacles. His skin underneath the manacles stung, and then with a soft tentative cracking the metal, dropped past freezing into the supercooled, split and fell past him to the pavement, sizzling in the night air. It had taken an extra second he could ill afford but hopefully would be worth it; Shaa knew it would be easier to just get the cuffs off than to contain the feedback from the iron interacting with his aura.
The temple in front of him was engulfed in flame, and the street was full with a rabble of faltering guardsmen and men wearing purple pretzels. The arsonist who’d been brought in with Shaa sprawled on the ground nearby, hands still manacled behind his back. Through the gaping hole in the wall and past the sheet of fire Shaa saw a churning mass of hovering flame, now sporting eyes and a ragged mouth and dark reaching talons. Either Oskin Yahlei’s true form has been unleashed, thought Shaa, or something very powerful doesn’t like him. The patterns of the thing’s aura boiled as well with flames of the mind, blistering images rolling in insane torrents, snatches of personality jumbled with memory and intellect, all tangled together in a searing flood.
Which meant the thing might react on an instinctual level. Shaa stretched out, carefully shaping the motion of his hand. The aura was rotating madly in the flames, not as any kind of neatly woven matrix but with arching loops and whorls and trailers that shot out to the sides and dangled free in the air, torn dead-end straws from a busted basket. Shaa selected a bristle patch of trailers, nudged them around toward the main mass, felt for their common frequency. With a complex pass of his other hand, a cigar-shaped cloud of matrix symbols pulsing and rippling in a complex compound beat sprang up around the trailer patch. The cloud and the trailers began to resonate against each other. Coils of dizzy flame spun out from the oscillating surface. Shaa gritted his teeth and pushed, and the trailers and the attached cloud jammed into the main mass of the aura of the thing.
The recoil threw him clear across the street into the wall in front of the opposite house. Even without direct contact he felt the irritant grow, felt the Presence notice it and try to swat it away, and felt a titanic roar as the now-fully resonating field expanded out into the rest of the aura. Shaa pushed himself into the ground at the base of the wall. He felt a blast of heat, the leaves of the tree over his head flared and burned, and the remains of Oskin Yahlei’s temple house exploded, sending chunks of flaming wreckage out across the city. He felt a dark roiling shape burst upward, writhing in upon itself, and head for the river.
He’d been lucky - the principle of economy of force had worked. If the Presence, certainly a god gone mad, had been operating on anything higher than a basal level the maneuver would never have worked; creatures with their intelligence intact were usually able to ignore a hotfoot. If that side of his luck held, the thing wouldn’t remember who Shaa was when it calmed down.
On the other hand, his breathing was labored, much too labored, and the pain in his chest had the force of the weight of an elephant behind it. He coughed, and noted a fine spray of pink froth. A hand helped him to his feet.
“Wow, man, that was really something,” said the man who burned down buildings with a note of professional respect.
Shaa shook off the hand and took a staggering step toward the temple. The heat singed him even across the street. The sound of the fire matched the roaring in Shaa’s own head. “I have a friend down there,” he said.
The surface of the rubble heaved in the flames and settled further. “Hey, man, I’m an expert,” said the arsonist, “listen to me. There ain’t nobody in there no more. This is something I know.”
“You don’t know my friend,” Shaa said. He tried to raise his arm, got his hand to the level of his chin. The arm was much heavier than it should be, and the crushing pain in his chest had moved up to include the shoulder. A fire-retardant field, that’s what I need first, he thought. He tried the first step, the equation for a fire-relevancy matrix. The breath froze in his chest. He fell backward into the grip of the arsonist.
“You don’t look so hot,” the man said. “All white and gooey.”
“Let me down,” Shaa said. It was worse than he had thought. It had gone beyond congestive heart failure this time. His use of magic, tied by his curse not only into his general metabolism but directly into the cardiovascular system, was giving him a full-fledged heart attack.
It looked like I’d really, finally blown it. I yanked off the ring, and with a shock like knives driving straight through my skin the thing seemed to weld itself to my fingertips. The sword Monoch had my right hand and now the ring had my left, and a magical firefight like I’d never seen was breaking out directly in front of my nose. I couldn’t follow it, things happened that quickly. Lights exploded, winds blew back and forth; the black aura got up off Oskin Yahlei like its own living creature, fighting its way through the strange blue cages that dropped around it, and then the blue cage was after me, too, flowing over my hand holding the ring. Hello, Gash, I thought, are you there?
I didn’t get an answer and the sword didn’t want to help either, it was too busy gorging itself on Oskin Yahlei, but then the blue cage closed on my wrist with an electric shock down to my bones, stopped by itself, and suddenly fell apart. The man who’d startled me into thinking he was Gash fell back, rallied himself, and launched another attack. I didn’t take it personally, in fact I was glad for the attention; in the few seconds that had passed I’d realized a couple of important things. The black aura had been locked to the ring until I’d let it out, and it was going to cause everybody a lot of trouble unless somebody got it back in. Wherever he’d popped up from, that’s what this other guy was trying to do. Probably he even knew what was going on. Hopefully I’d survive to talk to him about it, since I had a feeling the aura in the ring was going after me first.
I was trying to fight back myself, but the ring was ignoring me, the sword was ignoring me, Gash had gone to hide under a rock someplace, indeed the only thing that seemed to be noticing me at all was the black aura, which was throwing itself straight through the ring toward my face. Forces tried to tear my fingers loose from the bone. That was when the world turned white, a giant blast WHAAAMED!! into me, the ring ripped loose from my hand leaving pieces of my fingers still attached, and I was tumbled backward down the stairs, trailing a column of acrid white vapor from the front of my body. I hit the banister and spun in the air, something caught me square across my upper back, something surprising soft and yielding, and all of a sudden I was sprawled upside down with my feet waving over my head, tangled in the ripped fabric of one of Oskin Yahlei’s overstuffed armchairs. Monoch made a cartwheel across my vision, clanged against the stone flue of the fireplace, and dropped somewhere behind my head.
I struggled to my feet, having to fall on the floor first to manage it. Helices and flaming balls and the sharp flashes of released energies were still rolling down through the top of the staircase. I was aware of the blood flowing down my left hand and the fiery mass of bruises along my front, but I wasn’t going to let a little pain stop me now. The man fighting upstairs was my big hope for getting loose from Gashanatantra. If I was going to get him to do that, though, the thing he had to do first was deal with the aura I’d set loose from the ring. I grabbed up the sword Monoch with my right hand. The sword was more sluggish than usual - it tried to do its turning-my-arm-inside-out number but its heart wasn’t in it; all it really wanted to do now was lay around and digest. “Shut up and cooperate,” I growled at it, and I was just starting toward the stairs when the wall into the temple and that side of the ceiling fell in.