A Sudden Wild Magic

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Ah no,” the High Head politely corrected her. “What you have sensed is that all Arth, and particularly the citadel, is precariously balanced. It certainly has needs. Our work is performed very carefully to supply the needs without upsetting the balance.” He stood up to show the interview was at an end. “Any extra activity—music, artwork, and so on—would influence the vibrations in a way that might destroy the balance.”

  Zillah wanted to say that in that case, they should redesign the whole thing—anything to show she was at odds with him without giving away the real reason why she was so angry—but he was showing her to the wall, or door, or whatever, bowing her out and asking for Helen. All she managed to say was, “How do I find Marcus?”

  “The child will be brought to you,” he said.

  Then Helen passed her and disappeared, and she was in the anteroom under the severe eyes of the elderly mage. Roz looked the old man in the eye and demanded, “How much longer do we have to kick our heels in here?”

  He pursed his old lips and did not answer. It was obviously a battle that had been going on for some time.

  * * *

  4

  « ^ »

  By the time it was Flan’s turn to be interviewed, the High Head was in no good mood. Zillah’s accusation had eaten away at his serenity. Helen did not help by sticking doggedly and colorlessly to the Highland Games story. When faced with projections of the three worlds, she pointed to the second—the one Zillah had thought of as the pear and the crab, and known to Arth as Postulate—and declared the whole party came from there. Insipid liar, the High Head thought. Postulate and its people were known to Arth. The two universes guardedly traded objects of magecraft, talismans from Postulate for specula from Arth, and its mauve-skinned traders in no way resembled these female castaways. Sandra he treated with respect, as a quasi-Azandi, and was puzzled to find she seemed to think he was mocking her in some way. She claimed otherworld as her home, and he could tell it was a random guess.

  So then he came to the small, chirpy woman with the bright, dark eyes, determined to discover why they were all so intent on concealing their origin.

  Flan’s chirpiness was verging on bad temper by this time. Waiting about always gave her a headache. Or maybe it was Roz, sniping away at that old man. Poor old fellow, in his slightly shriveled blue uniform! You might as well make rude remarks to a Chelsea Pensioner because of your income tax. Flan herself wanted to get at High Horns. She wanted to get on with the job they had come to do. But careful! she warned herself. He’s quite capable of locking us all up.

  “The Highland Games?” she said. Curse Roz for landing them with that stupid story! Amanda had invented a perfectly reasonable tale of a strayed strato-cruiser, and bloody Roz had to go and embroider it! “Oh yes, Roz tosses the caber, all right. It’s a dirty great tree and she staggers around with it. Me, I’m a dancer. The Games has every kind of competition you can think of. I’m in the Eisteddfod section, which is singing and dancing and weaving, but if you could have talked to the others on the Celestial—the stratobus, you’d have found every kind of competitor. Pity they’re dead.” To her annoyance, Flan found she choked up here and tears came to her eyes. Poor Tam. One of the nicest boys you could hope to meet.

  “Healing Horn will, of course, be examining your dead companions,” the High Head told her.

  “What do you mean?” Flan squawked. “Autopsies? Oh, well, I suppose we’d have done just the same at home. But I hope you’ll have the decency to tell us—tell us why they died.” She choked and broke off again.

  “Of course,” he said. “Was Zillah Green a competitor too?”

  “Zillah?” Flan found she was furious with Zillah. What did she think she was doing, bringing not only herself but her baby along on what she must have known was a dangerous mission? Flan had been simmering about this from the moment on the rescue platform when she had realized Zillah had got herself on the Celestial Omnibus; but now she was so angry that, for a moment, she wondered whether to say Zillah was a pole-vaulter and get High Horns to make Zillah prove it. No. Zillah undoubtedly must have told him something. Flan did her best to make it awkward for her. “Oh no, Zillah just came along for the ride because her husband was competing. He’s a pole-vaulter.”

  To her annoyance, High Horns simply accepted this, with a bit of a look as if it confirmed something someone else had said, and then went on to show Flan three sets of floating colored shapes he said were worlds.

  “Worlds?” said Flan. “I never saw a world that shape. Worlds are round where I come from. But if it makes you happy, this one.” She pointed to the one that struck her as strangest.

  Other world. The High Head tried to suppress his annoyance. Another transparent lie. “Very well. As you probably realize, I have a pretty fair idea of what your party was doing by now.” He was glad to see that this terrified her.

  “What is that?” Flan asked. She was so scared, her voice almost went.

  “You were escorting one of your number to a meeting of great magical importance. I do not think your arrival here was a simple accident. I suspect some enemy on your own world tried to eliminate you all.”

  There was a short silence while Flan wrestled with both relief and incredulity. The High Head watched red turn to white in her face, and then the pallor change to a surge of red, and believed he had struck home. Eventually Flan gave a short, wild cackle of a laugh. “Oh no!” she said. “Oh no, what we were really doing, of course, was coming to attack and destroy your citadel.” Hearing herself say this, she wondered if she had gone mad.

  She could barely credit her ears when High Horns laughed too. “Indeed? Sarcasm apart, what was your meeting about?”

  I don’t believe this! Flan thought. I must be in shock. She heard herself say solemnly, “That’s something I’m not at liberty to say.” And as if that were not enough, she heard herself adding, “But I don’t doubt you could read my mind if you wanted to.”

  He looked decidedly shocked. “Great gods, I wouldn’t dream of that! There are very strict laws against reading the mind of a fellow human. But,” he said, standing up to show her the interrogation was finished, “I wish you could all bring yourselves to be a little more open with me. You must see that it is very difficult to restore you to your own world when we don’t know which it is.”

  Flan leapt to her feet too. “But we don’t know either!” she babbled. “I thought you knew that. We just call it the world—you know, the way one does—and none of us have the slightest idea how to tell you where it is, because none of us has ever been outside it before, and we don’t even know what it looks like.”

  She had no idea if he believed her or not. She tottered forth through the veiling of the wall with a feeling of having diced with death and unexpectedly won.

  * * *

  5

  « ^ »

  The preliminary reports from Calculus Horn came in later that morning, and they were somewhat confusing. It seemed that Arth had arrived at a node of fate which, although only a minor node giving rise to low-probability outcomes, prevented a fully satisfactory long-term forecast. Calculus had attempted long-term casts, but these were woolly. Two suggested disaster. One of these gave Arth as completely destroyed by the castaways, and the other suggested far-reaching changes; but since all eleven of the other casts gave the situation as largely unchanged by the refugees, High Brother Gamon had written off the two minority casts as the lowest probability and ticked the majority reading. Looking them over, the High Head had no hesitation in countersigning Brother Gamon’s conclusions.

  When it came to short-term readings on the castaway party itself, the confusion was even greater. Every single reading was different. Most balanced out into precisely nothing. Looking along the charts, the High Head saw love, success, and stability jumbled with death, disaster, and change in both major and minor readings. “This looks like the Powers of the Wheel saying, ‘pardon us, what was your question?’ to me,” he said wryly.


  “My opinion too,” said Brother Gamon. “If you take the disaster to refer to whatever accident befell that capsule, then there is nothing to suggest that their stay in Arth will be anything but peaceful and happy. But of course, I shall have to take detailed individual readings on all the survivors before I can be quite sure.”

  “Start those as soon as you want,” said the High Head. “Meanwhile, for horoscope purposes, look at all the close analogues to the Postulate worlds, and if those don’t fit, try analogues to ours. It’s going to be one or the other. As soon as you get a match, tell me.”

  He discounted otherworld and its analogues. Flan and Sandra had so plainly been lying. All in all, he sent Brother Gamon forth with considerable optimism, both of them confident that the castaways’ home universe would be discovered in the next day or so. And as far as early readings could be trusted, it looked as if these people were pretty harmless to Arth. You only had to compare these readings with the sharp indications of disaster read on the Ladies of Leathe, to see how little there was to fear. Tentatively he ordered that vigilance on the party be relaxed. He would be interviewing them all again anyway tomorrow.

  This done, he turned to Edward’s preliminary report on the dead in the capsule. So far, Edward was puzzled. All seemed to have died of total heart failure without any evidence of violence at almost the same instant. Edward conjectured that this instant of death was the moment when the capsule broke through into Arth and encountered the first wards. He simply could not account for the fact that death had been selective.

  The High Head’s decision was conveyed to the castaways along with an execrable lunch. Two young mages arrived carrying a large platter mounded with passet, which steamed overcooked vegetable scents and seemed to have uncertain-looking dark gobbets embedded in it.

  While they placed this unsavory heap on the only table, the higher mage who chaperoned them stood tapping his boots with his stick—officer’s baton? wand? none of the women were sure which it was—and gazing at some point above all their heads.

  “Vigilance upon you is relaxed,” he announced. “You will not any longer be closely watched, and you may go anywhere in the citadel within reason. You will be told if you overstep the bounds. And you will be careful not to interrupt any mage in his work.” So saying, he summoned the two young mages with a flick of his stick and departed, conveying them before him with the tip of it pointed at their backs. It was as if the young men were marched off at gunpoint.

  As the doorway folded shut, feelings inside the room were divided between suspicion that this announcement was a trick to get them to talk, and disgust at the nature of the lunch.

  “At least we can talk about this food,” Flan said. “What are those horrible-looking black bits?”

  “Burnt meat,” said Sandra.

  Helen put forward a long-fingered hand and squeezed one of the gobbets in a cautious finger and thumb.

  “Oh, don’t!” Zillah said. “It looks like a slug.”

  This earned her a startled look from Judy and a reproof from Roz. “There’s no need to be disgusting,” Roz said. “Well, Helen?”

  “Someone burnt the meat and then soaked it in water to make it soft, I think,” Helen said. “It may be the way they do things here.”

  None of them could manage much of the stuff, and Marcus refused to eat anything at all; although this, Zillah suspected, was because he had spent most of the morning eating bread and jam. “Oddie dug!” he shouted. Encouraged by Flan’s shuddering laughter, he threw a handful of black gobbets across the room.

  “Marcus has it right,” said Flan. “Ardy poo for breakfast and oddie dug for lunch. What a gift with words your child has, Zillah.” She might be angry with Zillah herself, but she did not feel Roz had the slightest right to treat Zillah so peremptorily. Having, she hoped, made that clear, she said, “Well, Roz? What say we test out this permission to go anywhere we like?”

  “Suits me,” said Roz. The two of them departed without another word. The veiling of the door opened to let them through without any difficulty, and no mage appeared, either to stop them or escort them.

  Sandra said unbelievingly, “It looks as if that mage meant what he said. In that case, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to find their kitchens and I’m going to tell them a thing or two.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Helen offered quietly. “Suppose we take the plate of stuff back with us? That will give us an excuse to go there.”

  Sandra thought this was an excellent notion. The two of them set off, carrying the large platter between them; with everyone’s forks stuck into it at random and Marcus’s handful of gobbets reposing on top. This left Zillah with Judy and Marcus. We’re the two shell-shocked ones, Zillah thought, looking at Judy sitting very upright against the wall. Judy’s eyes filled with tears from time to time. Otherwise there was almost no expression on her slightly droll face. She looked like a sad Pierrot. Zillah did not feel like crying. It was more that she had a blank, disconnected feeling, rather light and feverish—the way she had always thought a person might feel if they were coming around after a lobotomy. She simply could not get used to the fact that she was not missing Mark any longer. By coming here, she had put it out of her power to hope, and her misery was gone. Oddly enough, it did not seem to make her feel relief.

  But there was Marcus to look after. “Do you want to go for a walk, Marcus?” Zillah said dubiously. As far as she could work out, he should have been resting—or was it getting ready for bed? She felt more than a little jet-lagged herself. Every rhythm in her body was telling her that, though it was afternoon in Arth, it was quite another time on Earth. If Marcus was feeling the same, he would be restless and irritable.

  He agreed, “Awk,” at once and held out his hand to be taken.

  “I’ll come too,” Judy said, somewhat to Zillah’s surprise.

  The three of them went out through the almost unfelt folds of the doorway into the blue corridors beyond. Judy said nothing and seemed to rely on Zillah to choose a direction. Zillah let Marcus tug her the way he wanted to go. She rather thought he was making for the kitchens.

  If he was, Marcus had made a mistake. He stumped doggedly up one of the circling ramps, towing Zillah, with Judy sleepwalking behind, and plunged through a wide area of veiling at the top. The brightness and blueness on the other side made Zillah blink. There was a smell of asepsis. In great busy quiet, mages in pale blue gowns were working beside a sort of bier on which lay a young man with a handsome, friendly face, evidently dead. Because his fair hair was trailing backward, it took Zillah a second to recognize Tam Fairbrother.

  Marcus knew him at once. “Dib!” he cried in desperate sorrow, and advanced with one hand out and his face crumpled for crying. “Dib dead!”

  The tallest mage whirled around. Before Zillah could move, he had fielded Marcus with large, gentle hands—hands from which a blue shimmering stained with blood rapidly disappeared as they met Marcus—and turned him back toward Zillah. “I don’t think this is quite the right moment to bring the child in here,” he said, looking down on her with awkward shy firmness.

  Zillah recognized the curiously small, boylike face of the head doctor-mage. What was his name? Edward. He was nice and he seemed to like her. This made her feel truly bad about bursting in here. “I’m so sorry. Marcus just—just brought us here. I didn’t know—I didn’t realize you’d be doing autopsies. I’ll—I’ll take him away at once.”

  “For now. You’re welcome to bring him back in a day or so,” Edward said. He made it sound as if it were all his fault. Then, as Zillah started for the door with Marcus, and Judy turned dumbly to go with them, his large hand fell on Judy’s shoulder, stopping her. “She’d better stay,” he said. “She needs more healing than I knew.”

  Before Zillah was aware, she was out on the ramp again without Judy, rather taken aback at the power of this medical mage. At another time she might have been almost destroyed with embarrassment—blundering in on an autopsy like
that!—but Marcus claimed her full attention. He was very upset. “Dib!” he said desolately, over and over, as he stumped downward.

  Zillah had not realized even that Marcus knew Tam, and she certainly had had no idea that he liked Tam enough to give him a special name. As far as she knew, Tam had twice, but only twice, briefly visited Amanda, but evidently that had been plenty of time for him to make a hit with Marcus.

  “Dib’s all right,” she explained as they stumped she knew not whither, except that Marcus firmly led her downward. “He doesn’t hurt, Marcus. It’s like being asleep, only better,” she said, and found herself saying all the things adults do say to a child confronted by death. And they were so inadequate. Marcus had known instantly that Tam was dead. He always knew so much more than she gave him credit for.

  They came down to another wide veiling, blue fluting filling a sizable archway, which gave way into a sudden open space. Zillah was relieved. Here was something that might distract Marcus. The large, open square she had seen from the orbiting capsule stretched in front of them. It was possibly a parade ground, for it was nothing but a stretch of gravel with one carefully tended strip of grass around the perimeter. Here, sure enough, Marcus forgot his sorrow and ran gleefully out into the large, sandy space. Zillah followed, pretending to chase him—“I’ll catch you, I’ll catch you!”—to keep his mind on other things. She had to quell an attack of some kind of agoraphobia as she ran. Blue sky was overhead. The blue buildings around the square, reduced by distance to the height of cottages, might have concealed landscape beyond, except that she knew they did not. The blue sky was all there was beyond them. She had to keep her eyes on Marcus’s small trotting figure, and even that became the center of vertigo. For a moment the whole flat space swung upside down, and Marcus was trotting across a ceiling.