A Sudden Wild Magic

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “I have,” said the High Head, still in the flat, grinding voice of anger, “heard enough. And since you come before me without the slightest sign of contrition, your punishment will be the utmost reserved for those who trouble Arth’s fabric in this way. You will be banished to otherworld—”

  Tod looked up, astounded. “But—”

  “Silence,” said the High Head. “I’m well aware that you are heir to a Fiveir and consider yourself immune to punishment, but I have acquainted myself with your family tree, and I know you are not the only heir. You have a cousin and four nephews who can easily take your place. Am I not right?”

  “Yes, but,” Tod said feebly, “I was only going to say this will kill my old father, sir.”

  “You should have thought of that before,” the High Head told him, with considerable triumph. “It is now too late. Your banishment begins as soon as the necessary ritual transposes you. And, since you are so amorously inclined, I am going to place you in otherworld as the lover of a certain female. You will use your relationship with her to obtain information which you will then pass on to me. The weave of the ritual will leave your mind linked to mine so that you may do this. Have you understood?”

  Tod nodded, although in fact his mind seemed barely able to grasp more than the sounds the High Head was uttering. He could scarcely think. Feeble little phrases rotated in his head: It’s not fair—I only kissed her—He can’t do this—It’s not fair—Around and around. His mind seemed to have given up. Dimly he wondered if the swine in front of him had put some kind of clamp on his intellect.

  “Right,” said the High Head. “High Brother Nathan will instruct you further in your mission, and if you have any questions when you get to otherworld, the present agent can answer them.” He turned aside and summoned High Brother Nathan by sigil. When the Horn Head of Ritual duly appeared, somewhat flushed and disheveled, the High Head said, “Take this man away and prepare him for immediate transposition to replace agent Antorin. I’ll be along in ten minutes precisely to officiate.”

  He turned back to Tod and gestured. It gave him strong satisfaction to watch Tod’s trim figure be snatched away backward out of his presence, with the most uncharacteristic expression of stunned dismay on his face. So satisfied was he that he did not realize until Tod was gone that he had not, as he always did with his agents, privately told him the lie that he could come back if he behaved himself flawlessly. He found he did not care. He could dangle that bait when Gordano reached otherworld. “And he can’t come back!” he said aloud. “That broke through his self-possession a bit, I’m glad to see!”

  He turned again and summoned Zillah.

  She was ushered in, looking distressed and puzzled. “Look,” she said. “I don’t quite understand—”

  “Silence!” he snapped at her, and it pleased him that she stopped speaking and quivered as if he had hit her. “While you are here in Arth, you are subject to Arth’s laws, and you have just seriously transgressed these laws.”

  Zillah was as incredulous as Tod. She could not bring herself to take this seriously. “Oh, come!” she said, tremulously half smiling, “Tod was only—”

  “I told you to be quiet!” the High Head more or less roared at her.

  Zillah quivered again and pressed her lips together. She could see he was in a rage, and she hated people to rage at her. She drew into herself, shrinking into a corner of her mind and pulling strong walls around the corner, as she used to do when Mother screamed at her, while she tried to understand why he was so angry. When she thought of the boasts Roz and the others had made, she could not believe it was simply because Tod had kissed her. She was hurt, because she had thought until now that High Horns, though frightening, was a fair man.

  The High Head glared at her, breathing heavily, and promised himself he would break down the wards he saw her building, just as he had broken Tod’s composure. “You—”

  The room filled with call-chimes, and the master mirror lit with the sigil of the double rose, the call sigil of Leathe. Leathe had yet more to say. It caught the High Head off balance. He was still trying to turn his mind from Zillah, and sign the call to the outer office on Hold, when the double rose vanished and the face of Lady Marceny’s nasty son filled the glass instead. “Good morning, High Head of Arth.”

  The High Head whirled on the mirror. “Oh, what is it now?”

  The young man was not in the least perturbed. He smiled malicously. “Caught you at a bad moment, have I? Well, this won’t take long. It’s only an ultimatum.”

  “Ultimatum?” repeated the High Head. “What are you talking about?”

  Behind his back, Zillah leaned forward, staring, frozen into a stiff bend, with the word “Mark!” on her lips, frozen too. She knew it was not Mark. It had to be another analogue like Tod’s image of Amanda. But God! He was like him, whoever he was! This man seemed younger than Mark, in spite of bagging under his eyes and seams on his cheeks, and where Mark was cleanshaven, this one sported a little curl of mustache and a small, pointed beard. Rather like a goat, Zillah thought dispassionately. Unlike Mark again, this one’s face was full of malicious glee, with a suggestion of much greater viciousness hidden behind the satyr’s smile. But the voice was identical—and somehow the very differences in him served only to show how like Mark he was. Zillah’s frozen heart banged until her chest ached with it. And the misery of her loss poured through her again like a flood through a lock-gate. It had only been in abeyance after all.

  “Ultimatum is the word,” the face in the mirror agreed. His hand, long and elegant and white, and very like Mark’s, appeared and gave the little beard a mischievous tug. “There’s been a great deal going on here in the three days since I last spoke to you, Magus. The upshot is that we in the Pentarchy are going to give you six weeks—six of our weeks, Magus—to get some results. If you don’t have something to stop this flooding by then, Arth is going to be discredited and disbanded.”

  “Nonsense,” said the High Head, pulling his mind around to the point. “Leathe has no right in law to threaten Arth. Go and tell your mother that she’s making a fool of herself.”

  “Ah, but it isn’t just Leathe.” The young man chuckled—no, giggled, Zillah thought, like a particularly vicious schoolboy. “This is the whole Pentarchy, High Head. The Ladies have consulted with all the other Fiveirs. Frinjen and Corriarden joined us at once—they’re both getting swamped, Magus, while you sit in your fortress doing nothing—and Trenjen came in when the Orthe did. The king agrees with us, Magus. If you don’t make a move, he’ll use his powers.”

  “Oh indeed?” said the High Head. This had to be a bluff. “Then why haven’t I heard from the king direct?”

  “I’m sure you will,” answered Lady Marceny’s son. “But you know how slowly Royal Office moves. Red tape. Protocol. Leathe decided to give you advance warning so that you can get a move on now.”

  “My humble thanks,” the High Head retorted. “Now, do you mind leaving me in peace? I happen to be very busy.”

  “But certainly,” said the young man and vanished from the glass.

  His insolence, the High Head thought, was beyond even Tod’s. Goddess! How he hated the ruling class! He turned back to Zillah, fueled with additional anger and prepared to break her. To his further annoyance, she was staring at the master mirror with eyes that had become wide and large. Around them the rest of her face seemed pinched in and bluish white, as if she were suddenly near death from exposure.

  “Who was that?” she said. “On the screen.”

  “Only the chief Lady of Leathe’s despicable son,” he said. “I’m told it’s not really his fault he’s like he is. His mother has steadily perverted him from the cradle up.”

  “What’s his name?” Zillah asked, in a strange, breathless, unhappy way.

  “Herrel—Herrel Listanian, I suppose—he’d take his mother’s name since the gods alone know who his father was, though it’s rumored the poor wretch was a gualdian—” The High He
ad stopped himself, exasperated. What was it about Zillah’s peculiar powers that always caused him to be sidetracked into patiently answering her questions? No more. “Let us now return to yourself and the way you broke the law,” he said coldly. “Arth’s laws were not made lightly, you know. By your amorous seduction of young Gordano, you have seriously imperilled the stability of the citadel. I explained this when we first took your people in—and yet you still behave like a whore! What are you—a rutting bitch?”

  Zillah had gone back to her first meeting with Mark, the night when he dropped in to speak with someone in the witchcraft circle in Hendon. She had been so bored with them by then. Then she had looked up and there was Mark, speaking in his serious, confidential way with—what was his name? Never mind. It was as if the sun had come out. In the same dispassionate way she had noted Herrel’s beard just now, she had noted then that Mark seemed very repressed, probably rather a prig, and realized that it made no difference at all to what she wanted. She remembered the artless, almost greedy way she had made sure she was included in the party that went to the pub afterward. The first opportunity she got, she asked Mark back to her bed-sit with her…

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” she said, and looked up at the High Head almost judiciously. “There are times when I seem to behave like that—as if I can’t help it. If I could hate myself for it, I would, but I can’t. You’re quite right to call me names.”

  He gaped at her. Once more she had contrived to send this interview down the wrong track. It was typical of her. Ridiculously, he had an urge to leap to her defense and assure her she was not a whore at all. Nor a bitch. Oh—women! “Well,” he said, after a pause, “as you seem to have a proper sense of contrition, you had better go away and—er—think about it. But remember: if you do anything like this again, you will be in very great trouble indeed.”

  What got into me? he wondered as Zillah passed through the veils of the doorway like a sleepwalker. He shook himself and stalked off to Ritual Horn to supervise Tod’s departure.

  * * *

  2

  « ^ »

  I must go,” said High Brother Nathan, mopping his flushed face. “So must you. There’s going to be a ritual.”

  Flan watched him attempt to push the streaks of gray hair back over the bald center of his head. “One I can’t see?” she asked, composedly zipping herself back into her trousers. On the whole, she was rather sorry about the interruption. True, Brother Nathan had shamelessly blackmailed her. He had found her near as dammit undressed with Alexander in this very same gallery and swiftly made his bargain. He had not needed to say much. The sight of Alexander’s face when Brother Nathan said the word “punishment” had been enough for Flan. She would have agreed to anything. And she had gone to the assignation with clenched teeth, only to discover that Nathan could be quite sweet after all. And the poor old soul was in a real dither now. I’m getting quite soppy! Flan thought.

  “No, you can’t see—you mustn’t be seen!” he said. “Goddess, girl! It was only the merest luck the High Head didn’t have most of you naked in his mirror!”

  “All right then,” Flan said equably.

  But High Brother Nathan had had second thoughts, evidently not unconnected with the unfinished business between them. “On the other hand,” he said, firmly smoothing gray strands of hair to his scalp, “I don’t see that it would do any harm for you to watch, provided you keep well out of sight behind the wall of the gallery. It wouldn’t do at all for the High Head to see you were here.” He shook his uniform straight and picked up his headdress. “I’ll see you,” he said, hurrying toward the doorway at the side of the gallery. There he paused, artistically. Flan, who knew a studied movement when she saw one, wondered, What’s the old villain up to now? Brother Nathan turned around. “This ritual,” he said, “is to punish a serviceman, as it happens. It’s the same punishment I mentioned to you in connection with Brother Alexander. Though, of course, we both know Brother Alexander to be blameless, don’t we?”

  You old bastard! Flan thought. More blackmail! She had no desire at all to see anyone punished, least of all in the way that had brought that look to Alexander’s face. As soon as Nathan’s stout figure had faded through the veiling, Flan dived after him, only to find herself brought up short with such force that she was bounced back into the gallery. “Bastard!” she shouted. “Blackmailer! I’ll give you female harassment!”

  She would have shouted a great deal more, but by then, feet were hurriedly and hollowly shuffling in the great rituals room below. Evidently when the High Head ordered a sudden ritual, people jumped to it. Not knowing whether or not the High Head was there in person, Flan decided not to draw attention to herself. But she was still damned if she was going to watch this ritual. After plunging twice more at the veiling without the slightest effect, she sat down on the raked steps of the gallery with her face obstinately between her fists. Out of sight below her, objects clanged, feet continued to shuffle, two voices called off lists in a low murmur, and she could sense the room filling up. This ritual was big.

  Incense or something abruptly clouded the air, thick and sharp as woodsmoke—pine smoke, Flan thought. By this time she was feeling more than a slight tug of curiosity. She had spent the last two days professionally trying to improve the way these mages moved, and yet she had still no idea what the movements were needed for. When music struck up, the wavery, jangly sort favored by Arth, she yielded to her curiosity. Just one look, she told herself. She bounced to her feet and ran downward to crouch by the balustrade at the edge of the gallery.

  She got there just as the High Head swept into the room through the archway opposite. Flan dared not move. His eyes were moving all over, now high, now low, checking up on everything, and the look on his face scared Flan. She stayed in a crouch, with her chin on the plain cold stone of the coping, and cursed Brother Nathan all over again. At the same time, she was frankly fascinated.

  She was looking down into blueness, a hundred or more blue-uniformed mages in a blue stone room clouded with rising blue smoke. The nacreous metal of the incense holders ranged in a double star around a space in the center was the only thing that was not blue, apart from hands and faces. Around the central space, the Brothers were standing in a complex zigzag pattern, some facing the center, some lined up sideways to it. As the High Head raised his sword-wand, they sang, long bass notes that vibrated through Flan’s knees on the floor and her chin on the coping, while the musical instruments, still out of sight underneath, jangled a bewildering shrillness around the song. The effect was to make Flan decidedly dizzy, and for the first time, she found she was ready to credit all this talk of vibrations in Arth.

  She did not at first notice the young man being hustled through a narrow corridor between the standing mages. She saw him only when the blue-clad men leading him thrust him out into the star-space in the middle and hurriedly retired. Even then she had trouble recognizing him. He seemed dazed and his face was slack. As he staggered into the very center of the space, Flan saw that he was the young fellow who had been so cheerful and kind when they first arrived. Zillah’s friend. She forgot the name. She wondered what he had done—no, that was silly. It was just a question of who with. Zillah?

  The mages began to move. Again Flan became fascinated. Each line of men took its own path of difficult curves and strange zigzags, wheeling smartly at the corners, emerging from the complex of movement at the edges to gesture, bend, and sidestep, then plunging back into what seemed a living, walking maze. They were making, Flan was astonished to see, actual, living sigils of power on the floor of the room. Signs she knew well and signs she had never before seen formed before her eyes, were marked by the deep notes of the song, ratified by the gestures of those mages at the edge, and then re-formed to a new sign. No doubt to the mages down there it was just a muddled sort of dance they had to learn, but from up here she could see lines and patterns of pure power. She could also see, quite as clearly, the mages who slipped up
and muddled a gesture or muffed a turn, as many did. They were so slack. Tomorrow she would—

  The young guy in the center fell heavily to the floor. Flan looked at him almost irritably, for distracting her from the faults of the dance. But what she saw stretched her eyes wide and kept them that way, strained open and staring as if they would never shut again. Blood ran from a knuckle she did not know she was biting. He was melting. No, changing. Under her stretched eyes, he rose into gray, jellylike hummocks, heaving and mounding and shifting, trickling pulpily, until he was a big, slug-colored shape like a frog or a toad, except that, like a slug, the surface of him ran with some kind of slime, glistening stickily in the blueness.

  The creature lay humped and pulsing faintly while the dance went on around it, quicker now, with fewer pauses between the deep, sung notes. Smoke gusted upward and stung Flan’s staring eyes. Her hair moved and crackled, and she smelled ozone mixed with the smoke. Through the blue wreathing haze, she saw the reptile shape writhe. The slime on it was oozing to big, frothy bubbles, which burst and re-formed and burst again. It flung one desperate paw-thing out as it writhed, clutching for a hold on the smooth flagstones. God, he was in agony! It was like pouring salt on a slug. He was twisting all over.

  He was gone.

  Just like that, there was an empty, stained space on the floor. Oh my God! What a way to kill someone! Flan’s legs jumped straight, ready to carry her away, quick. She knew she was going to throw up. But the ritual was by no means over. Like the rituals she had taken part in at home, it had to be wound down. She was forced to wait there, retching, gulping against her bloodied knuckle, while the lines of power were drawn in reverse, and the music stopped and each mage relaxed and turned to his neighbors, chatting, laughing a little, as if this were all in a normal day’s work. Normal! By Flan’s watch, the entire ritual had taken a bare twenty minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. She scrambled up and ran. When the veil still did not 1er her through, she was sick on the veil, uncaring, and it parted with a shiver as if it were disgusted. Flan bolted forth and ran again.