“All right, forget it, relax,” Max said, dropping the Voice, “there’s no time for this anyway. Didn’t it ever occur to you that somebody’d slapped you with a spell of namelessness?”
The guy was moving his head around with a dazed look, but his acute distress had faded. “A spell of what?”
“What it sounds like. Hides your name, keeps anybody around you from noticing you don’t have one and that they’ve never asked you about it. Here, push me up this thing.”
The guy held out his hand, Max stepped on it, grabbed a handhold overhead, and went up the short flight of rungs cut into the side of the shaft. “What did you just do to me?” the guy said.
“No time,” Max said. “We’ve got to go find my friend Shaa -”
“Who’s that?”
“- Zalzyn Shaa, who saved your neck too, back up there, and who I’m sure is now in very lousy shape as a result, and then we’ve got to take care of the Death you set loose, and we’ve got to do that before he gets his act together.” Max reached the top of the shaft and put his hand on the cover, The cover was heavy, as usual, but unlike an ordinary cover this one was vibrating, almost shaking in its frame. Dust and a roaring whistle sifted down through the cracks in the wood. The cover drummed against Max’s hand as he applied his strength to it, and then his shoulder too.
“I’m gonna need a score-card before this thing is finished,” the guy below was muttering, following Max up the ladder. “Look, Max, about this namelessness thing - you might as well call me, ah, the Creeping Sword, at least for -”
The cover lifted, wobbled once back and forth, then lifted itself bodily and flew off to the side out of view. A flurry of leaves rushed down over Max’s head, and behind them the force of a wind growing toward a howl. Max rolled himself out of the shaft onto the street. Lightning flashed behind him in the direction of the river. In the sudden light-burst, Max could see a mass of churning clouds overhead, forming themselves into a giant wheel-shaped bank centered somewhere toward the wharves. He struggled to his feet against the kick of the wind. The head of the other guy - the Creeping Sword, aargh! - appeared at the exit to the shaft and glanced around. Max leaned into the wind, wrapped his hand around the guy’s tunic, and yanked him onto the street.
“The Creeping Sword?” Max yelled over the wind. “You got to be kidding!”
“Hey,” said the guy, “looks like I need a name and that one’s just sitting around, okay? I know nobody’s using it.”
Nobody in his right mind would dare, Max muttered. I think I like the namelessness better. But enough of this for now - “You’re gonna have to find Shaa yourself!”
“What about the plan you were just talking about?!” the Sword yelled back, coming to his own feet.
“It’s out of date, damn it!” A tree branch whipped past and down the street, followed by a tumbling ovoid door. “This is what I was afraid of!” Max had his eyes slitted and one arm out, like a blind man feeling for a handraiclass="underline" there were purple curlicues around his fingers. The pillar of fire that had been Oskin Yahlei’s base was a block or two behind them in the direction they’d come and beyond the crest of the hill, the fire being torn into long leaping shreds by the wind. One of the fiery streamers looped toward the ground south of the Yahlei temple and further away. In an explosion of orange sparks, a new coil of flames erupted from someone’s roof as the streamer lashed back into the air. Suddenly Max grinned.
“Eden, I love you!” he yelled into the wind.
“What?” said the Creeping Sword, his mouth next to Max’s ear.
“It’s Shaa!” Max said, “you can’t miss him! He’s got some kind of beacon on him, someplace in the street near Oskin Yahlei’s!”
“Just a second! Where are you going and -”
“Wherever the center of this thing is!” Lightning flashed again; this time it was definitely over the river. Max turned to go.
The Sword caught his shoulder. “If this Shaa guy is such a good friend of yours, why aren’t you getting him?”
Max spun, struck the man’s hand back, then somehow had a full grip with his own hand around the Sword’s neck, the other hand forcing back his sword arm, was holding him several inches off the ground, and was shouting up into his face. “Are you planning to be helpful, or is the only thing you’re good at being difficult? You want anything left of your city? You going to tell me you can take care of this mess?” Lightning crackled behind Max. The Sword’s eyes, drawn past Max toward the lightning, went wide. Max flung him to the side and spun again.
Visible now in the constant flicker of the lightning, spinning slowly in the air midway between the island of the Palace of the Venerance and the wharves, over the major navigable channel of the river, was the ghostly image of a towering castle.
Max ground his teeth, bent over the Sword, pulling him to his feet, and stuck an accusing finger in front of his nose. “You find Shaa and you keep him alive, you hear me? Anything happens to Shaa and you’re going to feel like Gashanatantra was your best friend compared to the trouble you’re going to have with me! Wherever you go I’ll find you, get the idea?” Without pausing for a reply, Max turned again and broke into a run, wobbling in the still-mounting wind, heading east toward the river.
Shaa, he thought, damn it, Shaa. But with the power reserves in the castle to draw on, the Death might be unstoppable, that is if the Death managed to get to the power stores. The only person who might be able to stop the Death before that was Max (even if Max hadn’t done too well against him back there in the temple), unless there was some other useful character wandering around he hadn’t encountered yet, and what were the chances of that? My best friend against my goddamn sense of civic responsibility, Max thought, and the whole thing probably a lost cause anyway; so what else is new. A funnel tube had emerged at the hub of the wheel of cloud, the lightning dancing up and down its walls, and the funnel was reaching downward toward the river. Max paused at an intersection, letting a tangle of wooden crates and a large bush blow past him down the cross street, then staggered ahead. Just as he reached the center of the street the wind suddenly redoubled with an even louder howl. The force hit Max and lifted him off his feet, flung him ten feet to his right and into the side of a house, and as he started to slide to the ground the world abruptly filled with sound, the sound of a vast hollow clang that rolled on and on like the boom of a twenty-mile-wide sheet of hanging metal. Karlini had not exaggerated, Max realized as the waves of sound pummeled him from above and the ground surging in resonance pounded him from below, the sky was indeed ringing like a solid metal dome that someone had just struck with a rod ten miles long. At least, Max thought, this may make Roosing Oolvaya notice that something rough is going on.
The massive gong died away into head-stuffing echoes.
Max struggled back to his feet. That removed one problem, anyway - Max had been trying to decide whether to expend a chunk of his remaining power in warning Roosing Oolvaya that it was a reasonable idea to take cover, but he didn’t think there was much he could add to the much more convincing demonstration of the gong. In fact, it also removed another problem - the problem of how Max was going to stop the castle from coming through. The answer was simple. He was too late, too far out of range, and the emergence cycle was too far gone with its own momentum. It couldn’t be stopped. And the castle was materializing smack-dab over the middle of the river.
Screams and cries were erupting all around, with torches being lit and people flinging open windows and other people beginning to run madly into the streets. Max cut around a man wrapped only in a sheet gazing with his mouth open to his chest in the direction of the river and pounded again toward the wharves. The tallest tower of the hanging castle was solidifying dramatically, color and substance filling it like paint spurted on a window from behind. The entire castle was accelerating in its counterclockwise spin and starting to settle toward the water. Lightning flashed, then a large jagged cluster of it struck high up on another tower, the blue-white energy clinging to the surface and writhing its way down the walls like a madly creeping bramble-bush. A red glow lit the rock foundation of the castle from underneath.