Deep Secret

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  “He thought he was alone, see,” Stan explained.

  “I see.” I looked at Nick, curled up on the seat of my car, and felt slightly ashamed of my suspicions. “The people in that car,” I said, “murdered three children and another centaur up on that hill. The first shot you heard was aimed at me.”

  “In that case,” Stan said, “you’ve every right to be paranoid. But I reckon it wasn’t this kid.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, and took the stasis off.

  Nick, because of the strength of the stasis, had no idea there had been an interval. He went on with the motions he had been making and scrambled frantically out of the car. “Thank god you’re back!” he said. His voice brayed and squawked with hurry and misery. “Please come quickly! My mother’s gone and stripped Maree!”

  “What? Opened a world gate through her? Are you sure? Where?” I snapped. Of all the hundred questions I wanted to ask, these seemed the most urgent.

  “Yes I am sure! I was there!” Nick brayed. “Over on that hill with the wood, in the lane. Oh please can you get there quickly?”

  “Get in,” I said, “at once. Give me directions.” While Nick scrambled round the car and tumbled into the passenger seat, I was in the driver’s seat and had the car moving before the doors were shut. If someone has been stripped by being in the exact place where a way of transit between worlds is made, you have to get to them quickly, before the two bodies they have been split into lose touch with one another. And Maree must have been split nearly half an hour ago now. As I snapped on the headlights and zigzagged among the vineyards to Nick’s directions, I cursed my stupid, suspicious delay. “Was your mother alone?” I said to Nick.

  “No. She was with a man called Gram White,” Nick said. “They didn’t see me. I kept out of sight. But I couldn’t do a thing to help. Then a centaur boy came out of the woods and shouted they were murderers, and all I could think of was get to your car while they were all yelling at one another. I just ran through vinefields and hoped you’d be back when I got there. Turn right again here.”

  I turned in a slew of dust and raced along the lane that ran along the foot of the hill, between the green-black slope of the wood and a bare black hedge, with my headlights lurid on the yellow surface of the track. There was no mistaking the small white body in the distance.

  “There! There she is!” Nick shouted.

  I screamed up to it and stopped in a slide of gravel. Nick and I both jumped out. “Keep back!” I warned him. “I have to see exactly where the gate opened.”

  He obeyed without question. He more or less tiptoed behind me as I went carefully up to Maree, keeping to the side where the wood and the hill loomed over the lane. Maree lay with her feet towards our blazing headlights, with her head on one arm, almost as if she had gone to sleep in the road. I guessed she had thrown that arm up as a reflex when the gate opened.

  “Describe exactly where they were, those other two,” I said. “Better still, move carefully to where you think your mother was and then guide me to where White was standing.”

  Nick nodded, a little bleak tremble of the chin, and went sidestepping gently out into the lane, almost to the bare hedge on the other side. He stopped about a foot to the rear of Maree’s motionless white shoe soles and some six feet to one side of her. “The man was pretty well exactly opposite,” he said, “the same distance away.”

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know because I can see the marks where we left Maree’s car, just over by the wood there, beside you. Maree was going to unlock the door and they came out round the back of the car.”

  “Where were you?” I said.

  “More or less where your car is, only in the hedge,” he said. “I was having a pee.”

  “Thanks,” I said. He had been pretty accurate. And it was fortunate that it was now dark. The strong white glare of the headlights from my car threw shadows from every pebble and every dip in the surface of the lane, magnifying even the very faint straight groove in the sand that ran for about a yard on either side of Maree’s ankles. It would have been almost invisible by daylight. I went down on hands and knees and enlarged the mark with my fingernails along its entire length. It was only then that I dared try to move Maree – or what was left of her.

  She was still breathing – shallow, faint, infrequent breaths – but as I rolled her on to my left arm in order to get that arm under her shoulders, I found she was very cold. I hoped, fervently, that this was only because she had been lying on the ground at nightfall. It had become very cold here at sundown. The air now had that still, frigid feel to it that promised frost before midnight. And Maree, as stripped folk do, looked as if the frost had struck her already. Her shaggy hair, which had been a sort of mid-brown, was now silvery blonde. There was no colour at all in her face. Her black leather jacket had become the palest of greys and her one-time blue jeans, I saw as I got my other arm under her knees, were nearly white.

  It was no trouble to lift her. Her body weight was exactly half what it should have been. I stood up with her easily and was puzzled to discover that holding her like this, light, limp and frost cold, was one of the most sexual experiences I have ever had. I also had to fight myself not to cry.

  Before I could lay her down again where I needed her, Dakros’s hover came hurtling down the hill at tree-top height, pinned me with its spotlight and plunged to a landing on the other side of the hedge. I heard mature vines crack and splinter under it and wondered how much he was going to have to pay the owner in compensation. Or maybe he owned the vines himself. His searchlight blazed through the hedge, casting long criss-cross shadows of empty branches over Nick and me and pretty well obliterating my carefully scraped mark.

  “Is there some more trouble, Magid?” his amplified voice boomed.

  Oh go away! I thought. I did not need Stan’s urgent croak from the car, “Don’t tell him!”, to decide on my answer.

  “Yes, but it’s trouble to do with my own world this time!” I shouted. “I’ve got the problem well in hand!”

  I might have saved my breath. Dakros was already crunching through the broken vines. Shortly, he was leaning through the hedge above Nick. I suppose one could hardly blame him. “What is it this time?” he said.

  “The same killers,” I said. “They seem to have stripped this young lady in order to steal her car. Do you mind turning your searchlight off. I can’t see my mark.”

  Dakros spoke an order into his com, looking keenly at Nick while he did so. As the great beam flicked off, he said, “You’re one of those two sightseers who gave Jeffros the slip, aren’t you?”

  Nick had no more desire than I had to confide in Dakros. While I laid Maree carefully in the right place alongside my now visible groove, Nick said, “Yes, I’m sorry. We had no idea it was a military operation. We just followed him here – Rupert. It was a silly jaunt. I explained to Jeffros. And we thought we’d go when everyone got busy. But – but it went wrong.”

  “Damned right it did,” Dakros agreed. “You were told to stay by the carriers. The Magid’s had enough trouble already, boy.” And he stayed, leaning into the hedge, watching, while I stepped back from Maree and performed the working that unfastened just a scrap of the walls between universes.

  The place was weak anyway. White, or Janine, had only sealed it perfunctorily. It burst open in our faces in a sheet of roaring red flame. Dakros and Nick both cried out and ducked. Even Maree’s tepid half-body flinched. I held one arm over my blistering face and worked like a madman to get that gate properly closed. It seemed to take for ever. I heard the hedge frizzle and a tinny smicker from my car as its paintwork blistered, before I managed to drag the broken edges of Infinity back together and seal them down in place. I put extra sealing on them for safety and then tottered to lean on the hedge for a moment.

  “Phew!” said Dakros. “What was that?”

  The lane was filled with
smoke, sharp singed smells and a stink of sulphur. I slapped at a burning spot on my trouser-knee and told him, “The inside of a volcano. Fool amateurs make these mistakes.” But I didn’t think it was a mistake. It felt to me as if the area around where Maree had lain had been carefully staked out.

  “But,” said Nick. “The other half of Maree—”

  “Doesn’t exist any longer,” I said. Nick stood, half pointing to Maree’s white remnant, so obviously stunned that I added, “We’ll have to think of some other way, Nick.” There was no other way, except one so strange and risky that I hoped he would come to accept what had happened and not ask. “We’d better take her home now,” I said.

  Nick simply turned and trudged to my car, where he opened the rear door.

  Dakros said, “I’ll be in touch quite soon, Magid, about the new Empress. We need to hold a serious discussion. And I still want those murderers handed over to the Empire.”

  “You’ll get them,” I said, “if it’s the last thing I do.”

  I bent and picked up Maree’s sad remnant again. This time I felt only strong sorrow. Though she was still alive after a fashion now, it was not for long. The stripped half of a person fades very quickly on its own. What I was picking up and carrying to the rear door of my car was a virtual corpse. Nick received it from me so carefully and laid it so considerately along the back seat that I rather feared he was still thinking of Maree as alive.

  Poor kid, I thought and, with that, remembered Rob and my fears for him too. “Let’s go,” I said.

  Nick obediently scrambled in beside me. I waved to Dakros and we went, further up the lane, around the same moment as the hover took off back to the hilltop.

  And I muffed it.

  I suppose I had excuses. We went from a different place, facing another direction. I was certainly in a state of shock after all that had happened, and quite tired. Magids are human, after all. And Maree’s attackers had staked out Wantchester the way they had staked out the area round her car. I think that, having failed to shoot me, they were trying to make sure I did not come back. But Magids are chosen for their ability to carry on regardless of difficulties, mental, physical and magical. It was only a question of homing on to the place I had set out from. I am still kicking myself.

  At all events, we were booming uphill Naywards, with the headlights kicking back on puffs of silvery mist between world and world, when thorn bushes began to appear in all directions, more and more of them, cluttering the hillside. The final slope was a total thicket. I went into bottom gear and drove on through, hoping a stray thorn didn’t do for the tyres. Twigs crunched and thwacked underneath and squealed clattering across the doors. The wheels juddered about on the springy growth. Maybe that threw my direction out just the significant fraction. At least we made it to Wantchester. I felt us get there. I was sure we were there when I saw the dim orange of distant sodium lighting – but we arrived with an almighty rending clang on both sides. The orange light broke into murky ripples overhead. And my expensive, reliable, carefully maintained car stalled, coughed, and gave up. I could hardly blame it. It was lodged between two sets of strong metal railings almost exactly its own width apart.

  The railings formed a sort of lane. I could see it ahead for yards. Overhead, the lane had an arched lid made of white corrugated plastic. I swore, with the inventiveness of helpless fury.

  Nick said, subdued, “I never heard that expression before.”

  “What’s happened?” Stan demanded. “Where the bloody hell are we?”

  “Whinmore Bus Station, I think,” Nick answered politely. “We’re in one of those long shelters where people are supposed to queue.”

  Nick was correct, of course. We were wedged halfway along the thing, and the only good part of the situation I could see was that the bus station was pretty well deserted. It was around eight o’clock on the Saturday before Easter Day. In a town like Wantchester, that probably meant that the last bus had left half an hour ago. But even so, I felt it was all too much. I put my face down on the steering wheel.

  “Then I can’t see us getting out in a hurry,” I heard Stan say. “We’re in too tight to open the doors, aren’t we?”

  “Yes,” Nick agreed. “And there doesn’t seem to be anyone about at all. Would it do any good to shout?”

  “Don’t try it. They’d wonder how we got here,” Stan reproved him. “And it will take heavy cutting equipment to move us. Since it’s Bank Holiday on Monday, I shouldn’t wonder if we aren’t here till Tuesday.”

  “Oh, surely…?” Nick said, not used to Stan’s lugubrious style of joke. “Couldn’t Rupert just go back into another world and then come out on Earth again in the right place?”

  “That he couldn’t, lad,” Stan said. “You have to be moving to make transit, see. If you’re not moving, you get stripped.”

  Which was possibly what our killers hoped would happen, I thought. I sat up. “What I’m going to have to do, Nick, is to force these two sets of railings apart, and stretch the roof with them, until there’s room to drive out of here.”

  “Oh,” said Nick. “Er. Rupert – who is the invisible person in here?”

  “It’s Stan,” I said. “Stanley Churning, Nick Mallory. Stan used to be a top jockey and a Magid, Nick, before he was disembodied.”

  “Er,” Nick said again. I could feel him decide that it might be impolite to ask if this meant Stan was a ghost. He settled for “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Same to you,” said Stan. “Cheers.”

  “Yes, and now shut up, the pair of you,” I said, “and let me get to work on this bus shelter.”

  There was instant respectful silence. I worked. Hard work, too, and I was weary. I set the principles of growth upon the sets of metal rails. I showed them how life started among minerals not so different from theirs, how it came from small beginnings and took force and direction, and suggested the direction that their growth might take. Then I turned to do the same for the rippled plastic roofing. And as I did so, because of the way I was working with growth and force and life, I had one of those moments that Ted Mallory and his fellow-panellists claimed not to have. Ideas, thoughts, explanations, notions, hit me and drenched my mind like the surf of a huge Atlantic roller. Rolled me over among them. I went down at first, and then sprang up and rode the wave with growing and enormous excitement. Everything I knew about what had been happening today assembled itself beneath me, as if the pieces had been lying around hoping I would see them and put them together. And I thought I knew what was going on, and why. As I reminded the lifeless chemicals of that roof of the small beginnings of life, I was sure that I did.

  There was complete silence from Stan and Nick, while I worked and thought, thought and worked, but to my surprise, as I set the suggestion of a forest canopy upon the plastic, I heard the faintest of mutters from Maree, and a very slight stirring. Either there was more life to her than I had realised, or – which was more likely – I had managed to set the principles of life and growth on her too.

  Finally I finished. I sat back. “This is going to take about half an hour to work,” I said. “I think it’s talk time.”

  Rupert Venables continued

  “Stan first,” I said.

  “Me?” said Stan. “Mother of pearl, why me?”

  “Because you know about centaurs,” I said. “Tell me if I’ve got this right. I’ve been told centaurs are incredibly loyal. If they’ve sworn friendship or made a contract with another person, then they won’t ever let that person down.”

  “We-el,” said Stan. “Yes. Roughly.”

  “So what happens if they have equal loyalty to a centaur and a human?”

  “The centaur always comes first,” Stan said. “Racist lot. They’ll let a human down in favour of another centaur any day. Mind you, so would we, the other way round, if you think about it.”

  “OK,” I said. “What about loyalties among themselves?”

  “Always family,” Stan said decidedly. “They do
n’t go for chiefs and kings and so forth. Don’t have them really. But they’ll do anything for a relative, and the closer the relative, the more they’ll do. The difficult bit is the way most of them don’t pair up for life, the way humans do; so they’re always hard at it watching whose son has a child by whose daughter and working out if that gives them a family obligation to the child. They call themselves cousins when they do. A lot of them waste half their time following bloodlines. Bore you stiff with it. ‘I’m his cousin but not hers.’ All that stuff.”

  “What is the closest family obligation?” I asked.

  “Mother to child,” said Stan. “Next to that, it’s a man-centaur to his sister’s children, then a woman-centaur to children she’s sure are her brother’s – not so easy to be certain of that, you see – and then you get sisters and brothers, and then what we’d call proper cousins. Father to children he knows are his comes trailing in sixth place. He’ll always look after his sister’s kids before his own.”

  “Right,” I said. So far, this was fitting in perfectly. “Now I’ve always heard that centaurs never lie. Is that true?”

  “Mm,” said Stan. “That’s the official truth. And you’ll never get a centaur telling you a direct lie, like saying black is white or anything like that. But they’re all of them quite capable of bending the truth, if they see the need. Like they’ll tell you two things that don’t go together and make it sound as if they do – or they’ll add in a little word you don’t specially notice, that makes what they really say into the exact opposite of what you think they say. I’ve been had by that a number of times. Smart people, centaurs. You should never forget that even a stupid centaur has more brain than most humans.”

  “I won’t forget,” I said. “I’ll remember that when I talk to Rob – if he’s up to talking, that is.”

  “He will be,” said Stan, “and up to bending the truth too. That’s another thing you should remember. Centaurs are tough. Stuff that would lay you and Nick here out for a fortnight, they get up and walk away from.”