“Max traded the ring to the Curse Administrator behind my back in exchange for his removing the curse on me,” Shaa said grimly. “We know Jardin’s been after the ring anyway, and whatever got him bashed up like that drained his energy so much it made him desperate to get it immediately; he needed the transfusion of energy. Except you were guiding things behind the scenes. You were advising Jardin, but you never told him that of course Max would booby-trap the ring regardless of whatever bargain he made. So you got Jardin to set off the trap and get consumed, and now you’ve taken his place.” He shrugged. “Perfectly straightforward.”
“Well, close enough,” said Arznaak. “Now, shall we proceed?”
Monoch flamed on. I braced myself - I didn’t know how much of my experience Iskendarian had access to, but I remembered the trouble Monoch had given me the first few times I’d tried to wield him and figured there was a chance Iskendarian would be thrown momentarily off his stride. As Monoch solidified and started to arc down at Fradjikan’s bowed neck, though, it looked as though Iskendarian had matters well in hand. He must have thought the same thing, because I could almost feel him relax and let Monoch’s weight begin to do the work. That was when Monoch suddenly jerked in the air, jarring Iskendarian’s arms in their sockets so hard his teeth snapped together with a crunch, and then, having established some sort of pathway, sent a blast of lightning through the hilt into Iskendarian’s body and up into his brain.
Iskendarian staggered back, hands trying to loose their grip on Monoch’s hilt, body jiggering uncontrollably, his vision going dark. Monoch hit him with another electric jolt. Iskendarian’s head whipped back farther than should have been possible given that it was still attached to his neck, his mouth opening for a shriek, but his whole body had now locked up, all muscles so rigid he might have been trying to pull his tendons out at the joints. He fell over toward the floor.
I hit squarely on the back of my head. My throat hurt as much as you’d expect given that a moment before Iskendarian had been trying to force our lungs out past our teeth, but I still managed to croak “Don’t - it’s me!” at Monoch before he came around and took my head off with a single chop. Instead, he spun in the air again and tried to drag me back to my feet.
It was either go with him or decide whether to lose my arms at the elbow or the shoulder. Since my joints were still locked it worked about the same as stepping on the business end of a reclining rake to raise the handle to the vertical. Where Fradjikan had last been seen was now another heap of erupting debris. The entire front of the building was going up, and as Monoch jerked me tottering away it was clear the rear area was totally lost as well. I could barely even make out the tracery of defense spells now, but from the way the flames were shaping themselves across invisible arcs and roiling within unsupported balls something had to still be at work. I might have shut my eyes then; whatever I was doing obviously didn’t concern Monoch one way or the other. I thought he might have even cut his way through a wall at some point, and he must have dragged me straight through some significant amount of flame, but it was just as well. I wasn’t too excited about having to live with myself right at that particular moment.
But no one asked me. I finally realized I was lying on my back; when I reluctantly dragged open my eyes I saw overhead continuing billows of smoke, and slightly below the smoke on either side a pair of blank walls, and lower than that a familiar fellow I was not at all surprised to find there.
It was my old pal Gashanatantra.
He had shifted further away from his tweedy Jardin disguise, of course, but I was coming to think I’d recognize him in any incarnation, even if his wife and other old friends didn’t. At the moment, the air of intrigue and menace and wheels revolving within wheels that usually hovered over him like a habitual warning of dangerous weather ahead was somewhat frayed as a result of the fact that he was covered in soot, his clothes were shredded, and he had apparently been close enough to a fire himself to leave them totally singed except for the patches that had entirely burnt through; he was holding one hand against a dark-stained patch on his side, and one temple was covered with matted blood. Next to him on the ground, barely as tall as my chest would have been if I’d been able to stand up, was a brass ball studded with gears and linkages and sighing steam cylinders venting their tired wisps of lackluster vapor.
Monoch was lying across my chest at an awkward angle, his point embedded in the alley muck at my side. Both of my hands were still locked around his hilt. I ignored Monoch and regarded Gash. “Should I be thanking you?” I said to him, ignoring the stabbing pain from the broken ribs in my chest.
“All things considered,” Gash said evenly, “I rather think you should.”
“Just so I know,” I added. But he wasn’t exactly giving his full attention to me.
He was now gazing down the alley at what was clearly the smoldering mess of the Karlini lab. From the look of him, too, I had a feeling this wasn’t the only wreckage he’d been involved in today.
“This is not how events should have turned out,” Gash was saying to himself, “not at all.” Then he turned back to me, eyeing me with a glance of new appraisal. “Apparently I was mistaken about certain things, but -”
“Such as?” I croaked.
“Nothing material, except possibly on the question of scale.” Now he was favoring Monoch with a glare. “You could have given me a little more warning. I might have been standing by closer to hand.” He shook his head. “Instead things are clearly worse, significantly worse, worse even than I had expected.”
“Great,” I told him. “Now you’re an optimist.”