by Mike Ashley
His finger hovered over the key-board. Life or death? Life and death? Whose? It dropped onto the “5.”
The message came up.
AN INCURABLE PLAGUE THREATENS ALL HUMAN LIFE ON THE PLANET, NO TREATMENT POSSIBLE. The message faded. EITHER “A” OR “B” NEUTRALIZES THE THREAT AND SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETES THE GAME. Fade. ENTER “A” OR “B” TO TERMINATE THE GAME. YOUR RESPONSE:
A fifty-fifty chance. No clues.
Billy Sampson began to scream. He screamed and screamed and could not stop. He stared at the message and screamed.
Billy’s father rushed into the room, grabbed Billy around the shoulders, shook him.
“Son,” he said, “what is it? What is it?”
Billy continued to scream.
Billy’s father looked at the computer screen.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, and punched “A.”
Along the Carenage, in the city of St. George’s, Grenada, an island nation occupied by foreign powers, the first child, a girl, age seven, went into convulsions.
THE INFESTATION
Tom Holt
I’ve written so many introductions to new stories by the ever reliable Tom Holt (b. 1961) in my anthologies over the last decade that I can’t think of anything new to say. For that matter the author of over thirty books from Lucia in Wartime (1985) to In Your Dreams (2004) hardly needs any introduction.
I ARRIVE AT THE docks half an hour late. How anyone is supposed to know this escapes me, because there is no clock in the dockyards; in fact, there aren’t any clocks in the whole of Ap’Escatoy, apart from the one-handed old wreck in the bell-tower, which stopped twenty-seven years ago and hasn’t run since. But the way everyone looks at me tells me, with absolute precision, that I’m late, and that my default has been noticed.
“You’re late,” the boss says. He’s a short, slim, elderly man with hair growing in his ears, and he doesn’t like me. He hired me because I was qualified and cheap, and his contract with the herring people stipulates that every consignment he sends must be examined for latent corruption and supernatural infestation by a qualified magician, in accordance with Guild regulation 344/7c.
Heaven bless regulation 344/7c, because without it there’d be a lot of barely competent wizards going hungry in this city. You hear people talking about how regulations and red tape will be the death of our mercantile economy, but as far as I’m concerned, they’re the pinnacle of our achievement as a civilisation. Guild regs make work for the otherwise unemployable, of whom I am one.
The boss doesn’t like me, and I don’t blame him. He’s a shrewd, hard-headed businessman; when it comes to paring overheads to the bone, he’s an artist. The sight of me, an untrimmable overhead, makes his palms itch. He’d have fired me years ago, only he knows he couldn’t find anybody who’d work for the money.
“Sorry,” I say, looking at my boots; I’ve been trained to stare down basilisks and manticores, but I find it hard to maintain eye contact with the boss. “Traffic. Two carts wedged head-on in Tannery Row. Had to go round by the fish market.”
Which was actually true. All my excuses are always true, and he knows it. But they’re still excuses, a commodity he has no interest in. “Well, you’re here now,” he says. “Shed fifteen, see the foreman. That lot’s got to be on board the Unicorn for the dawn tide, so you’d best get a move on.”
I nod, and escape. Shed fifteen is right down the far end of number seven quay. I know it well. It’s dark and it smells of fish, and rotten vegetables, and wet jute. This is going to be a long day.
The foreman must be new, because I don’t know him. That’s no surprise; the boss doesn’t keep foremen long for some reason. This specimen is pretty much like the others; big, strong, miserable, with a polished bald head and tufts of sandy hair over his ears. He may last three months, if he’s lucky.
“You’ll be the wizard,” he says. “You’re late.”
“Sorry,” I say. As my eyes adjust to the gloom, I’m looking at row on phalanxed row of five-by-four blackened oak barrels, thousands of the things. They’re divided into four blocks, with three narrow aisles running longwise between them. My job is to scry each barrel, one by one, for latent corruption and generic evil. “Which lot’s ours?”
He grins at me, a foreman’s grin. “All of them.”
“What?” I’ve given the foreman his treat for the day; he has a fine palate for other people’s pain. “But there’s thousands—”
“Better get started, then,” says the foreman, and there’s no arguing with that. I sigh, slump and wriggle out of my coat. He’s still grinning; but let him. He’ll be gone in three months, and I’ll still be here, thanks to my guardian angel, 344/7c.
Here’s what I have to do. The essence of our craft is the ability to see. Imagine – this isn’t me, this is what they told us on our first day at the Seminary – imagine you’ve been blind all your life, and suddenly you wake up, and you can see. Now imagine that you live in the proverbial country of the blind, where vision is such a remote concept that most people don’t really believe it’s possible. Imagine, then, that you – and maybe a few dozen others each year, out of a population of two million – have woken up on this fine spring morning, and you find yourself in a world crammed with wonders and horrors you couldn’t possibly have understood a few hours ago. That’s the gift we few share; lucky us.
And then you go to the Seminary, as I did; and you sit at the feet of beings who look and sound like ordinary men and women, but who have knowledge and power that totally redefines their existence. For the first few terms, you look at them and think, “That’ll be me one day”; and you do the work, read the set books, go to the tutorials, and you realise two things. The first is that the only worthwhile occupation, the only existence that makes any sense of the tragic farce of being alive, is magical research. To be a Fellow of the Seminary is to get up off the sea bed and walk up a mountain. These are the men who cut through the fetters of the human race, who prise knowledge out of its shell, who hold the ramparts against the constant furious onslaught of evil. The second thing you realise, at least if you’re me, is that you simply don’t have what it takes to be one of them. You could study all the rest of your life, know the books by heart, listen to the explanations a thousand times; but this is one anvil you can’t lift, one shelf too high for you to reach. You aren’t researcher material, and that’s all there is to it.
For those of us who graduate but are not chosen to continue our studies, there’s always commercial work. Fair enough. It’s not alchemy or fighting evil, but it’s useful, honest work and someone’s got to do it. You can scry for minerals for a mining consortium, or cast integrity spells on bridges and towers to stop them falling down, or tend the salamanders at one of the major foundries; you can heal, always a highly respected vocation, or you can join the Arbitration Corps and read litigants’ minds for a living; you can even, heaven help us, teach.
Or you can end up down at the docks, like me, scrying barrels twelve hours a day, in compliance with regulation 344/7c. In order to get into that particular line of work, of course, you have to have failed at absolutely everything else. It’s hard, but it can be done. Look at me. I managed it.
Scrying’s the first thing they teach you at the Seminary. Basically, all it means is looking at something, very hard. First you see the object itself. In first grade, year one, day one, they give you two eggs. You look at them, and (unless you’re so hopeless you shouldn’t even be there) eventually you see past the shell into the white and the yolk, and you can tell which is the rotten one and which is the good one. You can do it with eggs, or houses, or mountainsides which may or may not contain rich seams of valuable minerals; you can do it with people. If you’re any good, you can see right down through all the layers to the very essence of a thing. And, of course, you can do it with barrels of pickled herrings. It’s not difficult, in the sense of being complex or ambiguous, or requiring intelligence to interpret what you see. But it’s h
ard – bloody hard – in the sense that after a bit it makes you feel dizzy and faint and gives you a headache. This may explain why qualified magicians prefer not to do it for a living, if they have the choice.
What qualified magicians prefer to do is the next stage up in the curriculum; having seen the fault or problem, fixing it. This may involve changing one thing into another, or moving things by the power of pure thought, or subtly deflecting the interplay of conflicting forces to achieve the required result. But I was never terribly good at that sort of thing. I could do it, well enough to scrape through my final exams, but pretty well everybody in my year could do it a whole lot better. Hence me being in shed fifteen, with all those barrels.
Some technical terms explained. Latent corruption is just where the stuff in the barrel – herrings, usually – has gone bad. The buyer doesn’t want to prise off the lid and get a faceful of foul-smelling gas. You get a lot of latent corruption in the herring business. Supernatural infestation, also known as generic evil, is much, much rarer, I’m delighted to say. Currently, I believe, we’re turning up one case every fifteen years, in the whole of the Armat peninsula. But wonderful 344/7c requires exporters to scry for it because one case every fifteen years is still very bad, just as one catastrophic earthquake with accompanying volcanic eruption and triple-strength tsunami every fifteen years would wipe out an entire civilisation. Supernatural infestation is when one of Them hitch-hikes a ride in a harmless-looking container. And They’re clever (they have to be, with all those super-intelligent research fellows on their tracks all the time), and They’re resourceful, and They’re extremely good at what they do.
I’ll give you an example. When I was a kid, we went to visit my aunt and uncle on Spatha Island. The ferry goes round the tip of Cape Fortune, and it’s a long, dreary ride because there’s nothing to see on the cape apart from bare black rock and a few crumbled stubs of walls. But forty years ago, Ap’Ischun on Cape Fortune was twice the size of Ap’Escatoy – until one of Them sneaked in there, hidden inside a cask of nails, and found a sufficient source of nourishment to allow It to pupate and hatch. It was shortly after the destruction of Ap’Ischun that the Guild brought in regulation 344/7c; and not a moment too soon.
So here I am. The foreman’s gone off to shout at people. I have a lamp, not that I need it, and all these barrels to peer into. This is my life. I’m thirty-two years old, I live in one room out back of a wheelwright’s shop in the grotty quarter, I eat in the drovers’ diner under the aqueduct arches and I have just enough left over at the end of the month to pay for not quite enough cheap red wine to bomb myself into oblivion. I studied four years to get here. I’m a wizard.
It’s hard to describe the feeling of scrying through the side of an oak barrel. It’s a bit like punching your hand through a sheet of ice, a bit like reaching for something inside a clump of brambles; and once you’re in, it’s a bit like lifting up a heavy sack of grain with one hand and holding it at arm’s length for a whole minute. You get used to it. Actually, that’s a black lie. You don’t get used to it, but after a while you figure out how to take your mind off it. The best way is to think of something nice; food, sex, good music, the greyhound races. Mostly I think about being a proper wizard, transmuting elements and battling evil. I’m a sad bugger.
Today, as I peer my way through a billion herrings, I’m trying to solve Etzel’s ninth paradox. Nobody’s ever managed to do it, except presumably Etzel himself, and he died before he could publish the proof; either that, or his widow found it in an old trunk and snipped off the end of the parchment, where he’d written “This doesn’t bloody work,” before handing it in to the Seminary authorities. Etzel’s Ninth is a steel rose pushing up through the cracks in a glacier, while the skies rain blood. It’s a teaser, no doubt about that; but if you think it’s nuts, you should see Etzel’s Eighth, and he won an award for that.
I’m thinking hard about the steel rose; because it so happens that I have a friend who’s a blacksmith, and one of the trade tests before they let you go off and bash horseshoes on your own is to make a steel rose – thin curled sheets for the petals, hammer-welded onto a bit of bar for the stem, and I can’t remember offhand how they do the thorns. My friend showed me the one he made, and it’s a delicate thing; hellish hard to make, because when you’re welding it all up together, you have to get the heat just right or the whole thing’ll melt into a horrible fused blob. Anyway; could this, I ask myself, be the key to Etzel’s notorious riddle? If it’d been a steel carrot or a copper delphinium, there could be scope for ambiguity, but a steel rose – hardly a coincidence. If the steel rose is the dividing line between aspiring and mastery, let’s call that wisdom for the sake of argument, then where does that leave the glacier, and what price the skies raining blood? But if we let x be the moment of fusion when the petals weld together – I stop. I’ve seen something. I’m annoyed, because the barrel I’ve seen it in is three rows up and two rows in. I’m supposed to mark any dicky barrels I come across with a big red chalk cross, and I really don’t fancy clambering up into the stack and reaching across to make my chalk-mark.
I go back, and look again. I’m not absolutely sure what it is I’ve seen. Something; when you’ve seen the insides of as many herring-barrels as I have, you know when something’s wrong long before you’ve identified the actual problem. But it doesn’t look like any of the usual forms of latent corruption. It’s not the slimy black rot, or the grey feathery mould, or rancid oil or a dead rat in the pickle or anything I can see. But it’s something. So I have to stop, try and clear my head, actually think for the first time in I don’t know how long. There’s whole lot of things you can find in a herring-barrel that aren’t snagged by 344/7c. There’s caulking sheen, for instance, which is where the wizard (some poor dropout like me) who applied the sealing spell to keep it fresh was a touch heavy-handed with the influence. It doesn’t do any harm, but the top inch of the brine glows a little, and sometimes there are little sparkly bits floating in it. 344/7c has no problem with caulking sheen; but it’s not that. There’s fellow-travellers; which means small, inoffensive supernatural creatures, like nixies or sand-sprites, stowing away in the barrel. Fellow-travellers are a good thing, usually, because their benign presence has preservative qualities, and some people reckon it gives the herrings a delicate smoky flavour. There’s also bulking charms and weight spells, creating a false illusion of full measure; both of them are unethical and somewhat illegal, but 344/7c doesn’t refer to them, so they’re none of my business.
Well; I’ve ruled out latent corruption, and supernatural infestation’s so incredibly rare that whatever the thing is, it’s bound not to be that. A sensible man, who still has several thousand barrels to do, would mouth “sod it” and move on. But a sensible man doesn’t daydream about battling evil, and maybe he’s never sailed past Cape Fortune. I go back, and look again.
None of the above; no glow, no luminous blue vapour-trails in the brine, no anomalous inconsistencies of weight or volume. If I’m going to do this by ruling out every damn thing it could be, I’ll be here all night. Better to try and ascertain whether it’s the one thing I’m supposed to be looking for; and if it’s not, move on to the next barrel. Trouble is, looking for infestations isn’t an exact science. There aren’t any characteristic symptoms, tell-tale marks or – it slams into my head like a hammer, something I’ve never encountered before but recognise immediately; because it wants to be noticed. The quarry and the predator both hide, but the predator calls it an ambush.
It’s in there; and for a long moment it holds me, tight as a snare. The one thing all the authorities agree on is how perfectly fascinating They are, when you come across one. It’s not horror you feel, they say, or fear, or disgust or anger. The first, over-poweringly strong reaction is amazement; I’ve never seen anything like that before. The shape of the thing, which isn’t like any shape you’ve ever imagined; the colour, which is so amazingly different; the way it seems to hum and crackle w
ith the most astounding vitality; and the sheer beauty of it, of course, because nothing in the world is as beautiful to look at as They are. You know perfectly well what it is, no doubt about it, but somehow none of what you know about it matters. At times, the books say, They’ve been worshipped as gods by people who should know better; though not, needless to say, for very long.
That’s what they say, and they’re right. It’s fascinating, and lovely, and so advanced, so perfect, so stunningly complex and yet so simple; all I want to do is stand and marvel at it, that such things should actually exist in this tacky little world. It’s so different that once you see it, it’s like – here I am again, first day at school – it’s like up to that moment you’ve been blind, and suddenly you can see. Just being in its presence makes me believe I could possibly get to understand all the things that never could be forced to make sense. All the times I asked “Why?”; here’s the answer. Right in front of me.
They warn you about this, of course. Don’t allow yourself to fall under its spell. Which is a bit like telling a man who’s just gone off the edge of a cliff to stop falling, right now, or you’ll go to bed with no dinner. Don’t allow yourself – and they go on to say how you need to call on your inner reserves of perception and understanding in order to deny its glamour and confront its dark purpose. Fine; except that I have no inner reserves. If I had inner reserves I wouldn’t be here, I’d be scrying for gold in the Baec delta, on fifteen thousand a year. I am totally unequipped to deal with this situation – which, perversely, is what gives me the boost I need to tear myself away; because I know I’m not equipped, no, let’s be honest about it, not worthy to stand before this Thing in all its manifold splendour. I’m embarrassed to intrude on it. Sure, it’s smiling at me, calling to me, but I know who I am, so I know it’s only being polite. Really, it wants me to go away and fetch a grown-up.
