“Max told me to stay here with you. He said if anything happened to you, he’d -”
“Your solicitude is warming,” Shaa said sarcastically. “I am thankfully in better shape than Maximillian feared; at least I am not acutely dying. Under the circumstances, your friend Carl and I can protect each other for the time being.” Shaa cocked his eyebrow at Carl; Carl nodded. “Protect, that is, considering that with a mad god on the loose Roosing Oolvaya itself may not be here much longer.”
I didn’t like being a pawn, but on the other hand the situation was what it was; at the moment their plot was more urgent than mine. “All right,” I said, “I’m going. But if your friend Max tries to wipe me into the landscape somebody’s gonna pay.”
“Don’t worry,” Shaa said, closing his eyes. “Whatever happens, someone always pays.”
The mass of the castle rose sheer from the dark river deep in the heart of the current. Waves still reflected back from shore to shore, ruined wharf-front to castle stone; the waves were still tall but no longer monsters. Ice sheathed the base of the castle, sparkling strokes of flash-frozen spray cast up from the breaking river swells leaving their crisscrossing tendrils far up the walls. The castle shuddered and eased itself a few feet further into the muck. A large cake of frost peeled off the north wall and fell back toward the water, the high plumes from the splashes immediately freezing again against the super-cooled stone. Each avalanche of tumbling icicles cast its own ghost-light streamers on the towers as it dropped, cold transparent refractions of flickering green and blue, and the crackling of the ice and the pound of the turbulent river and the massive fidgeting of the castle and the cries from the city made a huge rolling groan that rose up into the sky.
The castle had stopped its rotation as it settled into the river bed. It rested now at a slight angle off the perfectly level, with perhaps a fifteen degree inclination out toward the wharves. Sourceless lights had appeared behind walls and deep within the towers, red and blue and purple, illuminating various details of the castle: backlighting a jagged crenellation here, the curve of a cylindrical spire there, the span of a free-flying arch high up on a downstream pinnacle. As if the mere presence of the castle was not strange enough, part of its structure was indeed still in motion. A small cylindrical tower capped by a peaked tile roof jutted out from the side of another, taller tower, with a vantage point out over the water and down past the curtain wall. Rather than being attached firmly together after the immutable fashion of stone, though, the smaller tower was pivoting against the larger one, swinging back, down, and out to the side, swooping forward at the bottom of its arc to point downward at a dizzyingly acute angle, then barely scraping past the large tower again at the top of its path; rotating back, out, around.
In fact, as Max looked closer, it became apparent that the rotating tower was even stranger yet. Two windows were visible on the small tower, lit from within, and the light also cast into relief the network of stones on the surface. Once you had accepted the fact that the tower actually was moving, solid stone against solid stone with no sign of a mechanism in evidence, one would expect the lighted windows and the tracery of stone cracks to be moving along with it. Instead, the windows were maintaining their same orientation, upright with respect to the larger tower, one facing directly toward Max and the other mostly edge-on, but the rotation was making the surface of the tower and the window and the stone stretch and flow as the shape inside swept around; it was as though the stone surface was artfully sculpted on a large flexible balloon, and this balloon was faithfully matching the excursions of a rigid framework turning within.
The tallest tower of all sprang out of the central cluster of spires and halls and coiled roofs and shot straight up into the night sky. That tower, if Max remembered correctly, was the one where Karlini had experienced his second visitation, when he had stumbled on the office of the Death and had seen a vision of the Death being attacked. A glowing red smoke-ring surrounded the tower just below its pointed roof. Within the ring, a ball of more intense and churning red was following a slow orbit above the stone. On each pass, it left behind it a crackling red trail that hung in the air and slowly decayed, almost fading to a wisp before the ball of flame came around on its next trip and brought it again to life. The fireball was merely sitting there, tracking its way deliberately around, and that was more worrying than almost anything else. It could mean that the Death was getting itself together and quieting down. On the other hand, it could also mean that the Death was gathering its strength for a supreme gasp of nastiness. Either way, the safe thing to do was to encapsulate the Death and reason with it later, but for that to be possible, the thing that had to be done first was to bleed off the Death’s power reserves. And that, Max thought disgustedly to himself, is going to need proximity.
The flood water had dropped below the two-story mark and was still falling as it ebbed back toward the river. A body spun past in a tangle of brush, its staring face upward. Hopefully the citywide toll was low - with the warning given by the flamboyant nature of the manifestation, people should have had time to get to upper floors. Even so, buildings had collapsed and other people had undoubtedly been caught in the streets, not to mention the destruction of the ships and boats; the result was sure to be grievous if not totally catastrophic. If the castle stayed where it was, though, river transit might ultimately be ruined and the economy of the city destroyed. It was certainly time for Max to get going.
The most feasible route was, again, the water. Leaving the other occupants of the roof still staring open-mouthed at the spectacle that surrounded them, Max slid down his cord toward the water, then balanced himself temporarily against a beam. The ebbing tide was choked with fractured wood, carriages and carts and wagons, chairs and assorted small furniture, pots, shrubs, and, yes, here and there a body. Quite surprisingly, though, Max had managed to retain his backpack, due no doubt to the reinforced construction of the straps, and in the pack was his face-mask and breathing tube; most of his water-resistant outfit had been shredded but at this stage that was beside the point. Max fitted the mask into place, shook loose the cable, eased himself into the water, pointed himself toward the river, and began a careful crawl stroke.
He swam with the current. Landmarks were difficult to make out, but the most important landmarks would be the river and the castle; those would be difficult to miss. People were beginning to rouse themselves in the buildings around him - relighting lamps, pulling others out of the water. Max rounded a corner. The street ahead of him was covered by mounds of floating lumber, from pieces the size of matchsticks all the way up to full structural beams and intact fragments of floor, twirling and shifting together on the water. One wall of a building protruded above the surface, a jagged platform of floor still attached to it five feet up. Several people had gathered there and were shining a lantern on the water below. Beyond the wall and the tangled wood fragments, looming like a square-edged leviathan with its back barely awash, sat a riverfront warehouse, pushed off its foundation and carried as a battering ram through several built-up blocks. Max made his way past its crushed front and along a side wall that was fairly much unbroken. Behind the warehouse, swept clean by its own plowing mass, a channel stretched clear and straight to the river.