Spell of Intrigue | Page 7

amplify. Well, two could play at that game, I'd thought initially, but it was turning out to be harder than I'd figured, since one of the major items of analysis was my own mind. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't nearly at the end of my patience with Max, as exasperating as he could be. Any aggravation I went through with him was pretty mild compared to knowing I might still have a serious enemy out there, somewhere, who had hit me with this spell in the first place and had not only wiped out my past but even any knowledge of my own name.
Magic. Things always come back to magic, don't they? I hate magic. Of course, more and more my own life was coming to be wound up with the stuff. I knew I was in trouble when I found myself hoping that my memory problems could be traced to merely being hit over the head one too many times, but Shaa, the physician, had assured me that my condition was not, as he put it, "a simple organic amnesia." Realizing I'd rather have physical brain damage than have to keep dealing with magic didn't make me feel more secure about my sanity, but --
There was a knock on the closed door.
Oh, no, I thought, not again. The last time there'd been someone at that door who'd managed to approach without triggering a squeak from the staircase I'd adjusted specifically to act as an adjunct doorbell, it had meant trouble, big trouble; the trouble, in fact, that had landed me with Max and his friends in the first place, and had nearly resulted in the destruction of all of Roosing Oolvaya to boot. While I was contemplating escape through the side window and over the roof, the locked door opened and a woman came in.
Unlike the last time, when the visitor had been pale and tweedy and merely radiated an air of deadly purpose, this one had the burnished skin of a person who spent a lot of leisure time sitting on a tropical beach listening to the waves. And watching the sharks at play. The major thing about her that reminded me of Gashanatantra was that aura of "We'll do it my way or we'll pull off a few fingers and then try it again," the kind of attitude that probably passed for conventional light chitchat in her usual circles. I didn't need the warning tingle in the back of my head to know that whatever the mess before had really been about, it was back in motion again.
I was about to say, "How's your pal, Gash?" thus getting in the first word, bolstering my fortitude with a typical display of hard-boiled effrontery, and making it appear that I understood everything that was going on, and then some. But even though it seemed the perfect way of opening a conversational match of wits between us, an uncharacteristic burst of caution froze my jaw. Instead, I merely leaned back against the side wall next to the window, crossed my arms over my chest, and eyed her with as unflinching a gaze as I could muster on such short notice. The door swung shut behind her of its own accord, a cute trick I was sorry I'd never practiced myself while business was slow, and she planted her feet firmly on the floor in front of it, spread at shoulder width, letting her arms hang, the palms open and facing toward me and the air curdling slightly within their grasp. Her eyes were the color of lightning.
The seconds ground slowly past. I felt like something invisible was trying to mash me backward through the wall, but that my body was shrugging off the pressure with the well-mortared firmness of a barricade of bricks. It could have just been my mental state. It could have been, but I knew it wasn't. Unless I missed my guess, the metabolism link Gashanatantra had hooked between us was automatically drawing on his own personal protection field. At the moment, the shunt that linked us appeared to actually be giving me some help; if so, it was just about the first time. Fortunately, the protection effect was totally automatic. My own attempts to draw deliberately on the link had primarily revealed that where magic was concerned I had deep reservoirs of total incompetence whose surfaces I had barely begun to scratch. There was one thing I could do, though, that fell in my own department. Rather than merely glower at the woman by the door, or let my jaw assume its practiced wide-open position on my chest, I forced my face into something approaching a sarcastic grin. I figured the effect was less than completely successful on the sarcasm front, but I was hoping