In the red glare that illuminated the castle and the river and threw highlights across the city waterfront and the Palace of the Venerance, something else was forming - a bank of clouds, emanating from a point directly over the castle and blowing out radially, starting a clockwise spin. A pinwheel of silver electricity spiraled out from behind a battlement and arched out toward the water. “Here we go,” Max said, making a last gesture and folding his fingers together tip-first to let them writhe under his palm. A whiff of dust shot out of the back of his hand and curled toward the chest of the Creeping Sword. The dust spun into the coupling-disc.
The disc flashed lightning-blue and seemed to lengthen itself backward into the Sword’s chest cavity, through it, behind it, elongating into a tunnel, stretching off in a zigzagging warp. The Creeping Sword looked down, an unsettled expression on his face, and had started to say, “I don’t think Gash likes -” when with a loud WHOOOEEERLL!!. something appeared in the far distance of the tunnel and hurtled back out toward them, a form of solid royal blue so sharp it burned the eyes; it bashed out through the disc in a thick rippling column, constricted itself into a point, and leapt toward the ring. The ring burst out in a hot burning gold as the blue column sliced down its bore and looped into the sky. Fifty feet above the river it disappeared against the night black.
Max’s eyes were slitted, watching the careening red fireball. One second, two - where was that thing? It wasn’t working! Forget it now, they were all doomed, and –
A round spot of blue appeared on the side of the fireball. The grid of the confinement field stood out suddenly like a glyph writ in lightning, blue lightning, the blue spot pulsed and flowed out, the ball flashed with competing forces - WHOOOM!! - silver-white with the blinding impact of an exploding sun washed the scene with glare. The world broke into two colors - the upper face of the castle and the near face of the Palace and the wave-peaks radiated a smoking flaring silver, and the shadows and hollows behind cast the dead black of the abyss. Waves of thunder rolled. Then -
The air was suddenly still. The thunder faded to mere echoes returning from the hills, the glare easing to afterimages. Near at hand, Max heard a low sucking, slurping sound - SLOIAYERRRULLP! - against the dying booms of the thunder. The space inside the ring flashed once, red running to blue, and the colors spun out and fell against the surface of the metal. A nimbus of ghostly blue wafted through the ring and dissolved slowly in the air. “Well?” said the Creeping Sword.
“Let’s put it this way,” Max said. He was having trouble putting words together, and his vision was refusing to clear. “Don’t try - don’t try to wear that ring or, or we’re going to have to go through all of this another time.”
“Then you did what you were trying to do?”
“Yeah, we got lucky.”
“What about Gash?”
“I don’t know, don’t know.” The wind was coming up again; a sheet of water blew off the crest of a river swell and sloshed into the boat. “Now gotta get Karlini.” Overhead, the wheel of clouds was thickening. The upper works of the castle glowed a sullen molten red, drooping and smoldering in strange liquid forms. Max felt out along the spell-guide. “Karlini! Karlini, you there?”
“Max?” The sound of Karlini’s voice was distant and weak. “Glad you’re back - the castle’s about ready to go.”
Max’s vision was not clearing, it was getting worse, it was closing in from the sides in a dark band. The throb of his head filled the air. The voice of the Creeping Sword sounded as far away as Karlini’s. “Max? Max!”
He was wobbling in the stern of the rowboat, looking up at the castle and talking to somebody who wasn’t there, his left arm half-raised and his right knee slowly folding, and them he just settled to one side, fell over on the rope piled in the bilge, and came to rest with his head hanging out over the gunwale. He’d bled off so much weight since I’d seen him earlier that he looked like a victim of sudden starvation - his clothes were dangling on him like sheets - and the parts of him exposed to the air seemed pretty well bashed in under the nasty red glow from the castle. “Max?” I said again, but he was out. And he’d left me holding the bag.
Gash was still back there somewhere, I could feel him, but Max’s little trick had taken him by surprise; he was weakened too, so I didn’t think I had to worry about him for a while. The real problem now wasn’t Gash, it was Max. He’d given me a pretty rough time, treating me the way I don’t let anybody treat me, using me as a convenient tool for his own schemes, not seeming to care whether he killed me in the process. And the process had hurt - my chest where he’d slapped his blue whatever-it-was spell felt like the riverfront of Roosing Oolvaya looked. Not only that, it had hurt Gash too, and I’d felt that at second-hand back through the metabolic link; I’d really gotten it coming and going. I wasn’t sure how I was able to be on my own feet myself, but I was, and I had to make some quick decisions because I was the one on the spot.
The simplest thing would be to forget this guy Shaa, forget the other friend Max had been talking to up in that castle, whatever his problem was and whatever Max had intended to do about it, and just roll Max over the side back into the river. If he came looking, I could tell Shaa I hadn’t made it out here in time, and if I really had to I could blow town or lay low for a few months. Yeah, most likely somebody would come after me, but I’d had people after me before; probably still did, for that matter, it was part of the business. The important point was that I could get rid of Max, right now, and I’d never have a better shot. Not only was it reasonably the best idea for me, it had a lot to recommend it from a purely good-sense and good-of-the-community viewpoint.
I hate magic, and one reason is the mess it’s made of the world; magic is more destabilizing than any other force of man or nature. Add a little magic to a situation and just watch how quickly things get out of hand. I didn’t know how much of the current disaster had been caused by Max and his crew and how much of it they’d been fighting themselves, but now my favorite city was a wreck, who knew how many people were dead, river trade could be ruined for years, and what really had been solved? It was infighting in a small group, that’s what it was, and all it did was trample people trying to live their lives and stay out of the way. If I took out Max it looked like I’d be ridding the world of a prime player in a game I didn’t like.
I almost made myself do it, I really almost did, and in a way, that shocked me more than anything else, because it was the kind of thing I’d promised myself I’d never ever do again. This mess had woken feelings I’d been trying to grapple with for years. They say you learn. They say you do what you have to do and after awhile you get used to it, but I’d done things years before when I was nothing but a dumb hired-sword punk kid that still hung dark in my memory, making me squirm whenever I thought of them and sending me out in the street to do something nice for some other poor dumb idiot. Maybe I just had a resistance to education. On the other hand, either we’re all going to be barbarians, or somebody has to rein themselves in, decide when they’re going to draw their own line, or decide when there’s something they have to do because they think it’s the right thing to do, even if it doesn’t directly benefit themselves, even if sometime it may be incompatible with their own survival. I’d done that, and that was the way I tried to live my life.
What is a good guy, really? Somebody who has principles and stands up for them? Somebody who does the right thing when they have a choice? Maybe. But what’s the right thing? Keep the strong from taking over the world? Sometimes. Don’t murder people if you can help it? Some people deserve murdering, so what then? Help out your friends? Usually. But what was the answer, the real answer? Damned if I know, and anyway the situation didn’t demand the whole book; on the scale of potential crucibles this one was pretty small, the whole affair was relatively minor to anyone who wasn’t actually in Roosing Oolvaya at the moment. It didn’t matter. I didn’t know what a good guy was, but I always thought of myself as one of them. I could see Max thought of himself the same way. Both of us tried to do the right thing as we saw it, even if it wasn’t necessarily the right thing for us. If I threw Max back in the water I couldn’t think of myself as the kind of person I wanted to be anymore, and that was worth a lot more to me than avoiding the trouble I’d surely inherit by keeping him alive.