Three stories tall and capped by a fierce mound of glimmering foam, its churning face thick with tumbling wood and pieces of rock and (there for an instant and just as quickly gone) the complete hull of a small boat, the wave came roaring down the street. Toward Max - its angry top just below his line of sight - around him - in a sheet of thrown spray thick as a sudden cloudburst - smashing through the building - with a giant creak and hop and stagger that knocked Max back against the railing and spun him to his knees - and miraculously past, flotsam spinning in its wake and the level of the flood water slowly subsiding. Spume made looping patterns in the slack behind the crest.
I charged back up the hill through the howling wind, looking for this Shaa person. Between Gash and Oskin Yahlei and now Max I was wishing I’d picked up something safe and simple when I was a kid, like glassblowing maybe, rather than a sword and a curious mind. At least Max was gone for the moment, and Oskin Yahlei seemed gone permanently, and Gash was keeping quiet wherever he was. A big shock knocked me to the ground with the sound of a giant bell. I rolled, got up again, rounded a corner, and found myself down the block from Oskin Yahlei’s flaming temple.
All the Guardsmen who could move had long since scattered, leaving a few huddled shapes behind them on the street. Flames had made the leap to a building on the next block downwind, and to another one a block or two further on as well. Fires didn’t bother me at the moment; I figured that that castle dropping into the river was going to send up a splash big enough to put out a volcano. I was looking for a beacon, Max had said. I trotted up the street, glancing around. Just past the glow of the Yahlei fire I spotted it.
The buildings flanking the alley where I’d stashed Carl Lake had partially collapsed. I didn’t see Carl, but I did see the body of a man lying on the ground in the street just across from the alley entrance. The form was covered by a whitish-yellow glow clinging to its contours. More of the glow made a half-dome shape in the air over him, starting at his head and popping over in a low arch to end barely beyond his feet. The man inside had his eyes closed and was breathing with some distress through his open mouth. I recognized him. He was the same guy I’d seen being held prisoner by Oskin Yahlei’s guards when I’d bluffed my own way through with my imitation of Gashanatantra. “Are you Shaa?” I said to the man.
One eyelid creaked open, and the eye rolled up and found me. “Zalzyn Shaa,” he said, in a low voice that merged into a wet cough. “Though only marginally,” he managed to continue, “at your service.”
“Your friend Max sent me to find you.”
“Ah,” Shaa said. “Then please help me prop myself against that wall.”
“What about this glowing thing?” I hadn’t wanted to touch it; I’d had enough with magic already to last another ten years, especially magic I didn’t know anything about.
“Don’t worry about the field,” said Shaa, “it won’t bite. It was a gift of sorts.”
“If you say so,” I muttered. I stowed the sword Monoch without complaint on its part, got my better arm under Shaa’s back, feeling nothing more than a mild tingling as I slid it through the glowing dome, and dragged him through the mounting ground tremors over to the building. When I stood up the prickling feeling was still there in my arm. Beneath the tingle, though, my hand (which had gotten a lot of punishment in the last few hours) was feeling surprisingly better. “Is this thing some kind of healer?” I said, flexing my grip.
“Unfortunately my system is resistant to curative spells,” Shaa said. He sounded a lot better sitting up. “The field seems to be more along the line of an energy transfuser, in addition to its attribute of attracting searchers to the vicinity.” He coughed and spit up fluid. “Just what is going on down there where you came from?”
The wind had died away while we were talking. I couldn’t see the flying castle from our location, but from the roaring and general pandemonium coming from the direction of the river and drawing closer fast I could make a pretty fair guess. “This big castle popped up over the river and dropped in. I think we’re hearing the sound of the wave coming after us now.”
“Hmm,” said Shaa. “Fortuitously we are on a hill. I assume the mad god summoned this castle?”
“Mad god, Death, yeah, I guess so. That’s what Max figured.”
“And he proposes to deal with it himself?”
“He did seem to have that idea,” I said. “He was pretty testy at the time we met, or I might have been able to talk to him more about it.”
“Indeed. I take it you are not actually Gashanatantra?”
“Gash -?” Oh, right, he’d seen my entrance at Oskin Yahlei’s. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“I propose we let stories wait until after the wave,” Shaa said, and he was right, because sure enough the wave was in the process of showing up. The street rumbled like a herd of giant buffalo were pounding up it, a cloud of spray and mist erupted out of the Yahlei fire and the heart of the fire withered into steam, fountains of water shot straight up out of the sewer covers, and then around the corner and up the street came the wave itself. It looked like most of its force had already been spent on the lower sections of the city, but it still had enough momentum to spill up the hillside and wash gently over the two of us there at the top, leaving debris scattered behind it on the street. I held Shaa out of the surf as the top of the water tugged at my knees.
“Things must be pretty bad down there,” I said.
“What remarkable insight,” Shaa muttered. I was about to say something else when I heard a sudden spasm of coughing and splashing behind us in the alley.
“Oh!” I said. “Carl!” The water was ebbing. I dropped Shaa back against the wall and bounded over him. A shape was flopping like a long carp tangled in a mound of debris ten feet into the alley. I splashed through and fished it out. It was indeed Carl Lake.
When Carl had finished coughing up enough water to go back to breathing, he looked up at me. “Thank you,” Carl said, “unless you have merely returned to finish your job?”
“I did what I had to do and you know it.”
Carl coughed again, glaring up at me. “May I join you?” he said to Shaa.
“It is a long wall,” Shaa said.
Carl plopped himself down next to him. “My head is in extreme pain,” he said to me in an accusing tone.
“Maybe we’re even, then.”
“Hm,” said Carl. He looked across the street, at the wreckage of the temple. What was left of the water on the street was now mostly foam. “The reason for our conflict has passed with the passing of Oskin Yahlei, yes?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess so. But -”
“I must interrupt,” Shaa said. “I regret the necessity of my own inaction when there are important things to do, yet you who are not really Gashanatantra, on the other hand, have no such excuse.”
“What?” I said.
Shaa raised one eyebrow. “Primus, for you to pass yourself off as Gashanatantra before Oskin Yahlei, you must have a high level of effective power. Secundus, your quite interesting aura supports this thesis. Tertius and higher, since from my reading of the situation you probably had a lot to do with that same situation in the first place, you know full well where Max is going and what he’s going to try to do, and you can further figure out that he will need all the help he can get. Now, are you the man of action you appear or merely a worn-down counterfeit?”