Spell of Catastrophe by Mayer Alan Brenner

Author:Mayer Alan Brenner [Brenner, Mayer Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy
Publisher: Feedbooks
Published: 1989-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

THE CURSE OF THE CREEPING SWORD

“I AM OSKIN YAHLEI," he said. The dark figure in the dark cloak, its hood thrown back across his shoulders, looked slowly and deliberately around the room, fixing each person there with his glare. The currents of the black aura pulsed and wove in the air like spun smoke. He didn't gaze upward through the palm tree at me, in fact seemed not to recognize my presence, and I kept very still, wishing I could even stop breathing. A heavy gold ring glittered on the middle finger of his left hand. The ring, in fact, made me think of the eye of a hurricane: the eddies and twirls of the mist seemed to circle around it, looping, streaming, billowing about in swirling coils. Somehow, in a strange way I didn't understand, that black swirling aura seemed more bound to the ring than to the rest of Oskin Yahlei himself.

I didn't care how this insight had gotten into my memory, whether I was tapping the outskirts of Gash's mind or what; I was just trying to ransack whatever I did know as quickly as I could. Me, I couldn't see an aura if it smashed me in the nose, and even if I could see it I wouldn't know what it was, but since Gash had pushed me into this mess in the first place I had no qualms about using his knowledge to help get me out of it. Get me out of it alive, that is, a remark that all of a sudden had a lot more gut meaning than it had ever pulled up before.

Even in a time and place where the gods are real personages, and they show up on earth in the flesh to give people trouble directly, without intermediary, you've got to make a distinction between the actual and the mythic. Not everything you can think of is real, even if a lot of weird things happen to be. I'd always thought Death was a concept and a state, not an independent entity. Unfortunately, based on the information my mind was now finding hidden in its files, that impression had been seriously wrong.

I mentioned before that human magicians aren't all the same. They're differentiated by specialty, the way they handle energy, their ethical orientation toward the use of magic, all kinds of distinctions. Gods specialized, too. I'd picked that up before, but I hadn't realized how far the differences went. The answer was, pretty far, and the Deaths were a perfect case in point.

Something there was never a shortage of were deaths, and nobody ever liked to waste a ready source of power. That was really the key. When a living creature died, its decay to the state of death released energy. The gods who were Death could tap and absorb this death-power. Pain, injury, slow dying or fast, they all gave off this energy, and some Death was usually around to take advantage of it.

If passive absorption was the whole story, who really cared; lots of phenomena are more ghoulish than that.

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