So Max collapsed in the stern and I had to think of what he’d want me to do next.
The most urgent problem would be this Karlini person he’d been talking to. The water around the submerged base of the castle was foaming and churning, piles of large bubbles were boiling up around it, and the general tenor of the dancing lights on the walls and the descending cloud bank overhead seemed to imply that the castle was building up to a big event, and that event was coming real soon. Max had a link to Karlini back up in the castle and Karlini would be waiting for Max to help bail him out of some Jam. Under the circumstances, my bet was that the thing Karlini needed bailing out of was the castle itself.
I could see a faint light-blue glow starting at Max’s left hand and looping off toward the castle. I dropped down next to him and stuck my own hand in that beam. What had Max done? - it looked like he’d just talked. “Hello?” I said. “Anybody there? Karlini?”
Sure enough, I heard a faint voice. “Who are you?” it said. “Where’s Max?”
“Max isn’t doing too well, he’s out cold. What kind of help did you need from him?”
I thought I heard a low “auugh!” kind of sound from the other end. Then, “If you need to ask, I’m sunk.”
“Karlini!” I said. “I may be able to shoot you some more power, if that’ll help.”
“I don’t know what he was going to try,” Karlini muttered, “and this castle’s going to move any second.”
I still had the ring in my hand, clenched on my palm in a fist; tingling waves of heat were spreading out from it through my hand and up my arm. I still had Gash’s metabolic link, too. Between the two of them they had to be good for something. I put my other hand, the one holding the ring, in the beam, and started to concentrate. Help Karlini, I thought. Help Karlini! I’d had practice with this kind of thing twice before, now, even if those episodes hadn’t worked quite as planned; this time it was coming more easily. I got my other hand free and slapped Max across the face a few times for good measure, splashed some water in his eyes. The blue beam rippled.
“What’s going on down there?” Karlini said.-
I was looking straight ahead with my jaw locked and my mind wound around “HELP KARLINI!”, and so I saw it start to happen. The disc of clouds overhead had been dropping; just as they reached the spire of the castle’s tallest tower the whole castle strobed white, flickered, and began to fade. Roosing Oolvaya lights glimmered behind it. Next to me in the boat, Max was still unconscious. He’d been out for the count, but maybe he was warming up a bit - he’d started coughing, thrashing his head against the water now splashing over him from the wind-driven waves breaking on the boat, and his hand was fluttering. His hand? I touched the ring to it. A puff of pale blue filled with snaky lines like the core of a bramble bush boiled up out of the air and shot up the beam toward Karlini. I thought I heard a voice say, “Max! I’m loose!”, and then a length of blue thread tumbled out of the sky like a snapped kite string and coiled across the boat.
High up on the castle, at the ragged base of the tower Max had ridden down to the river, another dot appeared and started to fall. I could see that the dot was turning into the figure of a man, and that was too bad because it was falling outward from the castle but not out far enough, and there was a stone wall and a cluster of small buildings in its way long before the waves. Except-
Except he’d timed things better than I had, and he knew more about what was happening too; so when he hit the uppermost roof in his path a second later the castle was by then no more than an outlined ghost drawn in spiderweb against the city, insubstantial as a cloud and fading further, and he passed straight through it without a catch and continued in the same trajectory toward the water. The water - THE WATER!
The castle was gone, and all of a sudden there was a big castle-sized hole in the river where there had been rock an instant before, and the water was starting to pour into it like a falling cliff. It was hopeless, hopeless for all of us, but I grabbed for the oars. Karlini fell. Then, suddenly behind him in the midst of the cloud of thrown spray, behind him and coming up fast - a white shape, a large growing moving shape, the shape of a giant bird! Bird and Karlini disappeared as the rowboat rocked, the incredible pull of the cataract dragging us backward. I was thinking “HELP!” and “RESCUE!” and other such things but nothing was happening, nothing good anyway, nothing but the downhill slide of the boat; another couple of seconds maximum and that was going to be that. A flicker of motion at the side, low above the waves - the bird again!, coming toward me with labored wing beats that barely cleared the water, Karlini no longer in the air by himself or in the river but in the dangling claws of the bird; and that was great for him but there was no way the bird could manage another person-sized passenger, let alone two. I dropped the oars, spun, yanked the boat’s rope out from under Max, and hurled it into the air. The rope tangled, uncoiled, started to fall, the bird flashed by overhead, the rowboat spun down the smooth rushing surface of the torrent - the rope snapped taut! The eyebolt at the prow where the end of rope was knotted creaked and began to tear through the wood. I grabbed the rope and strained back against it as hard as I could …
But the long moment passed and the rope held, and the hole behind us in the water filled, and the waves and giant ripples began to race anew back and forth across the surface of the river. The bird let go of the rope and soared exhaustedly away, and I picked up the oars.
From the bottom of the boat I heard a loud groan. I looked down.
Max had one eye half-open with part of its pupil showing, and was trying to lever himself up with a hand on the side of the boat. “Karlini?” he croaked.
“Under control.”
“Castle?”
“Up and gone.”
Max’s eye slumped closed and he sagged back into the bilge. “Well,” he said faintly, “I guess that was all simple enough.”
21. BACK AT THE BILIOUS GNOME
It was finally Godsday. On Godsday in a city like Roosing Oolvaya, where no particular god held unchallenged domination, shops were usually open and people went about whatever commerce they chose; other people, of course, typically scurried from temple to temple, currying their accustomed favor. This was not a typical Godsday, though, and so three activities were the most popular - cleaning up and dredging out, appealing to the gods, and appealing to the spirits; the remaining bars were packed. Cleanup might take weeks, reconstruction would take even longer, and the owners of the two intact shipyards would become very rich, but all of that felt very long-term at the moment. Even with all the work to be done, many of the luckier inhabitants of Roosing Oolvaya (and everyone who had survived considered themselves lucky, at least in some measure) felt they deserved at least a moment’s celebration.