Spell of Intrigue | Page 7

virtually no memory of my life before I'd arrived
in Roosing Oolvaya seven years earlier.
The Curse of Namelessness, as Max had called it, was apparently not
something you ran across every day, even if you were a sorcerer
specializing in that sort of thing. Max wasn't that type of specialist, or
at least I didn't think he was; his strongest talent that I'd been able to
identify was an absolute genius for driving people crazy with cryptic
references and vague allusions he would consistently refuse to 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