* * *
3
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Zillah went like a sleepwalker through bare blue halls and down impossible ramps. Marcus, she could feel, was a long way below and quite safe. She would go there presently. For now her mind was straining to contain that dissolute image in the High Head’s mirror. When she tried to put Mark as she had known him beside this other, this Herrel, it seemed almost more than she could do. Mark’s image, like a pale moon, would keep sliding behind Herrel’s bearded face, and only appearing dimly through. She supposed it must be that they were both only half the person they should be. Mark was all solemnity, seriousness, and responsibility, and the face in the mirror had nothing but humor, wickedness, and sly malice. Both half the person—both halves of a person. Well, there was no knowing about analogues, of course, but if you thought of them as identical twins—Analogues were like twins in a way—twins brought up apart from each other—the same person put in a different environment, so that different aspects of his personality were enhanced. No, because it was known that identical twins turned out quite alike all the same. With these two, Zillah thought that each must have repressed at least half of himself. Mark certainly had. Zillah bitterly recalled her vain search for humor in Mark—the sheer fun that instinct told her was really part of Mark’s character—and her frustration when he seemed to be constantly withholding it from her. With Herrel, she suspected she would search equally vainly for any kind of seriousness—but it must be there! Yet now Zillah could not rid herself of a feeling that there had never been any humor in Mark to find. She was sure of it, having seen this Herrel—as if she had stumbled on the missing half of Mark.
At this, it came to her like a bolt of electricity, Why not?
The question jolted her out of her sleepwalking state. She looked up and around the curved blue corridor where she found herself, to find it ringing faintly, as though the bolt of electric thought had somehow struck it physically. She could smell ozone.
And here, around the corner, just as if the striking bolt had called her up, Flan Burke came hastening. Or maybe a better word was fleeing, or scuttling. Flan’s face was pale, and her manner uncharacteristically dithery. “Oh, thank God!” she said. “Zillah! I thought I felt you around. Zillah, something awful’s happened to your friend—I’ve just seen the nastiest little ritual—he was your friend—I mean that dapper little fellow with the slightly smart-ass air—you know—”
“Tod,” said Zillah. “You mean Tod?”
“Yes, I think I mean him—the other one you go round with apart from the centaur boy and the kid with big feet—”
“Yes. Tod,” said Zillah. Flan’s eyes had dark bags under them and she reeked of sweat. What was the matter with her?
“Yes, well, High Horns and my Ritual boys have just disappeared him,” Flan said. She gulped back a retch and leaned against the wall, shaking. Her teeth chattered. “It was—awful. They dragged him to the middle—he was looking absolutely stunned—I don’t know what they did to him—not before, I mean. The ritual was all living lines of power—I saw that—and it was quite short really—it just felt like several lifetimes. But, Zillah, first he—sort of changed—he kind of melted into something gray and lumpy and slimy—and they boiled him—I knew it hurt—and then he went. He wasn’t there anymore, Zillah. Then they all packed up as if it was all just one more job in the day and left. After that I didn’t care if High Horns saw me. I ran. But, Zillah, what did they do?”
“I don’t know.” Anger scoured Zillah—a different form of electricity. So High Horns had punished Tod. He has punished Tod and turned me loose with just a caution! The injustice of it filled her with rage, and the clean blast of that rage seemed to make a whole lot of things clear to her. She had wondered that this place did not seem evil. Now she knew that evil was here. How stupid—how innocent—of her not to have remembered that evil seldom appeared to be evil! “I’m sorry, Flan,” she said. “I’ve got to go. I must find Marcus.”
“Go?” Flan wailed. She did not want to be left alone. “Can I come with you?”
“No, you stay here and go on spoiling the vibrations,” Zillah said. “From what High Horns said, the place is practically rocking on its moorings. Push it right over. Have fun. Now I have to go.” She sprinted away down the nearest ramp with a speed that surprised Flan.
“Damn!” Flan said, sinking to a crouch against the wall. “Have fun, she says! I could cry. I want to go home. I think I hate magic.”
Zillah ran. She fastened her mind on that place where she had always been conscious that Marcus was and continued downward towards it, ramp after ramp. She was aware, as she ran, that this did seem like her usual habit of ducking out as soon as things got nasty. But it was not, not this time. Perhaps all the other times she had ducked out were simply a preparation for this time. She could do nothing about Tod, not here, not now, but she could help his friends, and after that she could go on to fight her own battle.
Down she went, where the lights got dimmer. Among the pat-pat of her own feet, she heard the beat of others. Brothers in search parties seemed to be everywhere. Blue uniforms hurried past below the next ramp. There were more in the distance at the end of a corridor. A further ramp down, blue uniforms milled in a storeroom beside her. They bothered Zillah not in the slightest. She was somehow aware that there was a path, twisting and intricate, between all these searchers, and timed to miss every single one, and she took that path. It led her, a breathless ten minutes later, to a corner behind a deep fish reservoir where Philo and Josh lurked with Marcus.
She heard Philo’s whisper before she saw them. “No, it’s only Zillah, Josh.” She rounded a corner and found them. Josh was backed right into the corner, more or less wedged into a space only just big enough to contain him, with Marcus crouched between his front legs and Philo behind, right underneath. They all relaxed as they saw her.
“Dare Dillah dum!” Marcus proclaimed. The tone of his voice was I told you so!
“What’s happened?” Philo whispered, peering out above Marcus. “The place is full of Brothers hunting for us. Are we in big trouble?”
“I think you may be,” Zillah said, and she told them what Flan had told her.
Their faces twisted into almost identical worried horror. They were quite at a loss. Philo crawled out from under Josh and mechanically planted Marcus on Josh’s back. “Goddess!” he kept whispering. “We are in trouble!”
Josh protested, “But I’ve never heard—no one ever said anything about that kind of ritual!”
“But it’s what they meant,” said Philo, “when they talked about punishments.”
“Then what shall we do?” said Josh.
“What I’m going to do,” said Zillah, “is to leave Arth. There’s someone I’ve got to see, over in your main world. Why don’t we all go there?”
Josh and Philo looked at each other and then back at Zillah. “Zillah, I don’t think you understand,” Josh told her kindly. “There’s no way to get to the Pentarchy except by personnel carrier when the big tides are running—and the next tides aren’t going to be for months.”
“Not to speak of the fact that Josh and I would be breaking the law if we go back before we’ve served our year out,” Philo added.
“But if you stay—” Zillah began. There was no point in going on. Along with the mere words, Flan had put into Zillah’s mind a strong image of what she herself had seen—Tod melting into something alien and obscene. It was as if Flan had not been able to help conveying it. Zillah knew that both Josh and Philo had received that image in turn, from her. What Zillah found almost impossible to convey to them was the fact that the twisting, intricate path she had seen leading to Marcus was still with her. It led on from Marcus to Herrel. But it was such a strange and delicate thing that there was no image of it that she could convey. It would be like asking them to look at an invisible thread. She simply knew it could be traveled. And she could only try to explain. “Have you been right under this citade
l? I mean, when your carrier brought you here, did it orbit the place the way our capsule did?”
“No. It came straight to the entry port,” said Philo. “What do you mean?”
“We went up the walls on one side, and over the middle and down the other side,” Zillah explained. “And you know how wide the citadel looks—as if it ought to have a flat base miles wide underneath? Well, it hasn’t. We went right underneath twice, and each time there was just a blink—only an instant—before we were rushing up the other side again. I think the fortress narrows to a point there. High Horns—I mean your High Head—told us that the place was made out of a piece of ground that belonged to the Goddess. And I think that just there, just at the narrow point, it could still be joined to your world—anyway, I know it ought to be.”
Philo and Josh looked at each other again, with a slow, stunned sort of hope growing through their anxiety. “Josh,” said Philo, “how do you stand with the Goddess? I’ve never dared ask, but I hope I haven’t offended. It may depend on that, whether we—”
He was interrupted by the echoing shuffles of a search party descending the nearest ramp. Josh started into motion with a curvetting leap that threw Marcus forward against his torso. Zillah saw his arms come back to steady Marcus as he vanished into the dimness ahead. Philo seized her hand, wrapping it completely around with his own hand, and they sprinted after Josh together. Behind them, there was silence. The search party had stopped moving to listen, in order to locate the sounds of their feet. Zillah and Philo both ran on tiptoe to cut down the noise, but they both knew they were being heard. They dared not stop. Josh was moving so fast, ahead in the dimness, that they had to keep running or lose him.
They ran, guided by the soft beat of Josh’s hooves and the occasional faint glimpse of his white whisking tail. Behind them they could hear the pursuit closing in a multiple rubbery hammer of feet. Philo was gasping before long. Zillah guessed that fear was making him hyperventilate. She grew increasingly anxious. Josh was not on the path she could see so clearly, and they were deviating more from it with every second. She wanted to shout to him about that, and about Philo, but she dared not let the pursuit guess they were in trouble.
Then, to her immense relief, Josh accidentally cut back into the right path by swinging down a ramp, and they caught him up at last. It was so dark down this ramp that Zillah could only see Josh because of the pallor of his coat. He seemed to have his knock knees braced while his hind legs nervously trampled, and he had been forced to spare a hand from Marcus to hold himself up with against the wall. This ramp was unusually steep. Zillah put a hand out to brace herself, too, and found, to her surprise, that the barely seen wall was rough and dewed with water.
“Philo,” Josh said, sliding awkwardly downward, “put a whole heap more protection round us—quick. They’re doing some kind of strong location magework on us.”
Philo’s hoarse breathing slowed down and he whimpered slightly with some kind of effort that Zillah could not detect. But she detected the result almost at once. In the same soft, yearning way that Philo liked to wrap his arms around her, something seemed to wrap all four of them in. The dark and narrow ramp went suddenly safe. They crept downward in a calm stronghold, pillowed by something intangible and rather sweet.
Marcus felt it and immediately became very jolly. “Dart,” he remarked loudly. “Diting. Ort go dlidder-dlidder.”
“Hush, love,” Zillah said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Josh panted. “Philo’s good at this—in short bursts. They’ve lost us completely again.”
Zillah wondered how Josh knew. The result, for her, of whatever Philo was doing was that she lost even the faintest sounds from the pursuers. It was like having her head wrapped in a bolster. They slid slowly downward into what seemed a wormhole that grew darker with every step, and warm and wet. All she could hear was Philo’s breathing and the somewhat frantic scraping and backpedaling of Josh’s hooves.
They rounded yet another corner, and Josh did not go on.
“Dop!” Marcus announced.
“What’s the matter?” Philo asked.
“I don’t know,” said Josh from below. “There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go to.”
Zillah found this hard to believe. No one would carve a ramp out of stone that led nowhere. The path she could see in her mind lay clearly onward down there, below Josh’s braced hooves. Perhaps it was too narrow for a centaur. Then they were stuck. She unwound Philo’s hand from hers, put her back against the rough and curving wall, and pushed past Josh. Dark as it was, she could feel that the passage continued to spiral down beyond him, and it was no narrower than before.
“See?” said Josh. She could feel the panic behind his voice. He would have to back himself upward, and he was not sure he could. “We’re stuck!”
“Nonsense!” said Zillah. In a surge of irritation at Josh’s pointless panic, she snatched the hand he had braced against the wall and hauled him forward. He came with a startled trampling.
“Hey!” Philo called from above, panicking too. In his distress, he lost his hold on whatever was wrapping them in, and the dark wormhole instantly became a noisy, sinister little trap, filled with echoes, scufflings, the trickle of water, and the roaring of an unfelt wind.
Zillah found herself suddenly terrified, and furious with the pair of them. They were being such wimps! “Hang on to his tail, you fool!” she screamed at Philo, and “Come on!” at Josh. She heaved angrily on his hand. Power rose at her need, and wrapped her round.
In another trampling rush, during which the unfelt wind rose to become the roaring of a gale, the three of them staggered on down and were then, abruptly and briefly, weightless in a vortex, which caught them, whirled them, and then, with shocking suddenness, shot them forth into blazing light.
* * *
VIII
Earth
* * *
1
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There was a way, Maureen thought. Her eyes were closing, and pricking from the smoke with which Joe was filling the flat. She could turn her own tiredness to her advantage—use it, in fact—if only she could get Joe off guard. Then she could sleep as long as she liked. She promised herself sleep, held it out as a reward to herself for doing just this last extra piece of hard work. The trouble was, it was mental work. Even wide-awake, that was the kind Maureen was least adjusted to.
She rubbed her eyes to stop the pricking. Held out the reward. Sleep. Carrot to donkey. “I can’t think why you do this dirty work,” she told Joe.
He stopped in the act of stubbing his latest cigarette into the loaded ashtray. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I can’t think how they induced you to come here and spy. You’ve told me how you hate it. And I know nothing would induce me to go to your place and pretend to be something I’m not.”
He looked at her suspiciously, but she had put just the right amount of contempt and boredom into her voice. He laughed. “You’d do it, all right, if you had no choice. They made sure I had no choice, didn’t they?”
“How could they?” Maureen wondered. Her manner suggested he had to be lying. “You’re at least as powerful a magician as I am—and you know I’m not one to be caught easily. You had your work cut out to set this up, and I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been tired to death.” She pretended to think. “You mean they caught you when you were tired too?”
“Of course not,” said Joe. “They caught me with a woman.”
She laughed, lightly and incredulously, and admired herself for how well she did it. “Cloak and dagger! Incriminating photos! I don’t believe it!” God, this was hard work!
“That’s not how they do things on Arth,” Joe said, with equal contempt. “Mind you, it was a put-up job, I’m sure of that now. There were these two girls who came over with the embassy from Leathe. Antorin and I were both fresh from Oath—you won’t know what that means, but you can take it from me you feel—well, caught—boxed up before you’ve had a chanc
e to look around—and we were the two who were told off to guide the party. And I still don’t know how they worked it, but it wasn’t long before there was only these two and us two. Fresh young things. Both swore they were scared to hellspoke of all the mageworkings going on in Leathe and said they hardly knew any magecraft themselves. We believed them. We were fools, but Oath takes you that way. You realise it’s too late and you wish you’d stayed quietly at home in the Pentarchy.”
He was distracted. Behind him, on the arm of the sofa, the half-extinguished stub end smoked in the ashtray, a thin, irritating wisp. Maureen kept her eyes on it. Concentrated on it as an annoyance. I wish he’d put it out properly! It kept her awake. It also kept a trivial idea at the front of her mind in case he started to notice what she was doing. Very slowly, she started to edge her mind forward to his. “Oath? What Oath?”
“You swear celibacy. It makes sex illegal,” he said irritably. His eyes were fixed on misery a universe away. “I see now I was never cut out for it. I fell for that girl—I was like a rutting bull—well, you know how I get—and I swear to the Goddess I’ll never forget until I die the way they all came bursting in, her Lady, my High Brother—loads of people—and the High Head walking through the lot of them. You feel a right fool. You want to be sick. And of course my sweet little girl who doesn’t know any magecraft obliges them all by holding me helpless just as I am. If I ever get back, I’ll find her and I think I’ll kill her.”
A Sudden Wild Magic Page 19
