There was, without any apparent disturbance, a wooden tray now lying beside him on the grass. On it was a rack of toast flanked by a glass dish of butter and a jar of marmalade. A bone-handled knife was laid carefully across a glass plate on top of a paper napkin with a pattern of puppy dogs on it. Beside that was a glass of orange juice, and milk in a jug that matched the plate. A mug with the words THE BOSS on it and a blue steaming coffeepot materialized as Mark looked. He felt considerable irritation.
“He’ll need a strainer,” Gladys said. As the strainer duly appeared, propped in a little glass bowl, she added, “They can’t remember if you take sugar or not.”
“I do, I’m afraid,” Mark said, and tried to suppress his irritation. He had tried, any number of times, to persuade her that magic was not just something you used as a home help, and that she had skills too important to be squandered in this way. Most of the time Gladys pretended not to hear. When she did listen, she laughed and said she had plenty more where that came from, and besides, it never did anyone any harm to keep in practice. She looked at him challengingly now, knowing just what he was thinking, and he did his best to seem impassive. A glass bowl full of sugar cubes came to stand by the milk jug.
“Eat,” she said. “You need the energy.”
Mark laid aside his hat and wedged the tray across his knees in its place. Breakfast, however it arrived, was thoroughly welcome. As he buttered his toast, he saw the two cats return and, quietly and disdainfully, station themselves among the others. Gladys continued shelling peas until he was on his second cup of coffee. Then she looked up again, a sharp, full look.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“Would it surprise you,” asked Mark, “if I said Chernobyl was no accident?”
“I feel bad about that,” Gladys said. “You know I do—we all do. Damned if I can see how none of us noticed that radioactive stuff until it was too late to do more than push it off to where there were fewest people to harm.” She paused, with her hands on her fat thighs. “You’re not saying that just to make me feel better, are you? Who’d do a thing like that?”
“The same people who distracted you with the bombing of Libya,” he said. “Who’d cause World War Two, or the Cold War, AIDS, drugs, or—come to that—the greenhouse effect? Who isn’t interested in our having a space program?”
“People,” said Gladys. “This is people. You don’t have to tell me the world’s a crazy place. If it isn’t stupidity, it’s greed with most people.”
“Yes, but which people?” he asked her. “Suppose I were to tell you the same people were responsible for all these things I just mentioned and a great deal more I haven’t?”
She was silent. For a second or so he feared she was rejecting every word, and he sighed. She was too old. Her face was blank. Her mind was set. He should have quelled his fear and gone to Amanda instead. Then he saw that Gladys’s expressionless face was turned toward something in the grass. Her lips moved. “Jimbo,” she said faintly, “I’d have to ask three questions, wouldn’t I?”
She was talking to that animal of hers. Some people claimed it was a monkey. Others declared it to be a small dog. Mark himself had never been sure which it was. All he knew was that it was brown and skinny. When it appeared, it scratched rather a lot—as it was doing now. He suspected this was a device to stop people looking at it too closely.
“I’d have to ask,” said Gladys, “Who? and Why? and What proof has he? Wouldn’t I, Jimbo? And why is he coming here with a tale like this when the Berlin Wall’s down at last, and just as Russia and so forth start being more friendly?”
So her mind was working, after her own fashion. “That’s all part of my proof,” Mark explained quietly. “Ask yourself—or Jimbo—who might want all technologically advanced nations at peace with one another at the moment when the world’s climate is changing.”
“Sounds like a well-wisher,” she said.
“Not if you consider that they started the global warming at the precise moment when we were all distracted by Chernobyl,” Mark told her. “It’s quite a pattern of theirs—they lull us, or they distract us until it’s too late—and it quite remarkably often seems to be aimed directly at us, at magic users in this country. I’ve got pages of proof in my briefcase to—”
“Printout things!” said Gladys. “You know I can’t make head or tail of those. Tell it plain.”
Mark creaked about in his cane chair, wondering how to explain. “Well,” he said at length, “let’s begin with global warming. Do you know how much of this country will be left if the polar icecaps melt entirely?”
“I saw a map on the box,” Gladys assented. “Not much.” In the grass, the skinny animal appeared to paw one of her freckled bare legs. “I know, I know, Jimbo,” she said. “He’s on to something. I know that. It’s the Who and the Why that worries me. Who’s going to want the world at peace while they heat us up until we’re all tropical and flooded?”
“The same people who wanted a war fifty years ago,” Mark said.
“How do you make that out?” she said. “War and peace. That puzzles me. It doesn’t make sense!”
“It does,” he said, “if you consider all the inventions and discoveries that came out of the war. I’m not just talking about rocketry and nuclear power—I’m talking about the seven new forms of protection the Ring discovered during the Battle of Britain. I’m talking about the ways we’re going to have to think of now to hold the water back, not to speak of all the new cooling techniques we’ll need when the world gets hotter.”
There was another long silence, during which a few more raindrops pinged on the colander and the breakfast tray. “Someone using us to learn things,” Gladys said. “That’s not nice. What proof have you?”
Mark reached his pale hand out to his briefcase. “For one thing, I called up records of all the plans, blueprints, and prototypes that have disappeared over the last twenty years. There’s a hell of a lot. The significant thing is that two-thirds of them vanished so completely that they’ve never been traced.”
“Oh, industry,” Gladys said dismissively. “What about us?”
“Exactly,” said Mark. “We don’t keep records. For the important things, we use word of mouth.”
They looked at each other across the littered grass. The bushes tossed as if a shiver had run through them.
Gladys levered herself from her plastic chair. “Up, Jimbo,” she said fretfully. “Time I was getting lunch. This is all too much for me.”
It sounded as if she had given the whole thing up. Mark followed her anxiously as she lumbered into the house, dutifully carrying the tray with him. It was dark and redolent indoors, of herbs, pine, cats, and bread. Plants—some of them tree-size—grew everywhere in pots, as if the garden had moved in there in the same way that the house had spread onto the grass. Mark fought his way under a jungle of tree-tall plants, which reminded him of the things you might expect to find growing in a bayou, and found her busy in the elderly little kitchen beyond.
“You didn’t need to bring that tray,” she said without turning around. “The cats would have seen to it. I’ve only chicken pies today. Will that do, with peas?” Before he could suggest he had only just had breakfast, she went on, “It has to be one of the Outer Ring, doesn’t it? No one else knows enough.”
“Yes,” he said, sliding the tray onto a surface already full of flowerpots. Some toppled. He was forced to enhance the space in order to make room for the tray. She’s got me squandering power now, he thought. “Can I help?”
“No, go in the other room and sit,” Gladys said. “I need to be on my own when I’m thinking.”
Mark went obediently, highly relieved that she was prepared to think about it, and sat on a hard sofa amongst the jungle, staring out beyond the lozenge-shaped glass panes of the verandah door. She had let the rain come down now. It was pouring outside, steady white lines of rain, and the room was nearly dark. The cats were arriving indoors around him. The cane chairs we
re now on the verandah, along with most of the other things. Mark sat listening to the rilling hiss of the rain, and it had nearly sent him to sleep by the time Gladys called him to lunch.
“You still haven’t told me who,” she grumbled. “Has he, Jimbo? If someone’s using us for guinea pigs, I’ve a right to know, Mark.”
Mark picked at a large, squashy commercial chicken pie and some remarkable bulletlike peas, sighed, and went with her, for security, to another level of the continuum, where he gave her his theory. He saw her eyes widen in the gloom of the kitchen.
“There’s never been any sort of proof of that,” she said. “Eat up. I don’t want to hurry you, but I’ve got to get to the hospital. There’s someone needing me there.”
He was fairly sure he had lost her now, but he did his best to eat the pie. Anxiety caused it to form a hard lump, with corners, in his stomach. He watched Gladys encase herself in a transparent plastic mac and sort through a floppy purse for money.
“You can come too if you like,” she told him. “I’m still thinking—and I’d like you to see this girl anyway. Coming?”
He nodded and followed her out into the soaking garden, where he was not particularly surprised to see the taxi that had brought him here once again drawn up outside the tumbledown gate. He climbed into it after her and sat curled up around the square pie in his stomach, wondering whether to feel hopeful or simply wretched.
* * *
4
« ^ »
It was clear that Gladys knew her way around the hospital. She waddled swiftly ahead, encased in her ectoplasmic mac, down an interminable corridor and into an elevator. Mark thought, following her, that only the raindrops on the surface of the plastic showed that she was not in fact being manifested by some medium or other. He was not surprised when none of the people they passed seemed to notice her. He was putting out the same kind of Don’t see, but with an effort. Hospitals always bothered him acutely. They were so full of pain, and of pain’s obverse, cheerful insensitivity—or was cruelty the word?
Gladys turned to him in the elevator. She looked intent and busy, almost cheerful. “They brought this girl in around five in the morning,” she said. “The poor thing was hurt bad, and she put out a call. Only one call. Then she stopped and drew everything in—as if she’d made a mistake. Anyway, she needed everything she’d got just to stay alive with. Luckily I managed to hitch on when she called. I’ve been monitoring her ever since, and there’s something very peculiar there. As a matter of fact, when you turned up, I was sure it was going to be someone come about her. You gave me quite a surprise. I’m not often wrong that way.”
Mark only nodded. The elevator shaft was like a section through the varied pain of the hospital. The lift carried him past the blinding worry of a parent, the grinding of a broken bone, the eating acid of an internal growth, fever dreams, and for a short—mercifully short—instant, the vivid agony of a knife slicing anesthetized flesh. He had to fight to shield himself.
It was still as bad when he left the elevator and followed Gladys down further corridors where they passed beds. This hospital was on some kind of open plan. Every few yards or so, a corner with windows held a cluster of beds. There were wrung faces on pillows. Women here and there sat up and, in the concentrated egotism of mortal sickness, greedily ate chocolates or stared while visitors harangued them. When they came to the place Gladys was looking for, that was a corner too. You could have taken it for a corner where equipment was dumped, had there not been a bed there. And here was relief. It was such blessed silence from the insistent pains of the hospital that Mark did not understand at once.
Gladys nodded at him. “Feel that? Did you ever know such shielding?”
Only then did Mark associate the silence with the bed around which most of the equipment centered. Silly of me! He marveled that the occupant of the bed seemed so young and small. Anyone who could block out that amount of pain while being so sick as this girl must be a powerful adept indeed. He thought he knew everyone throughout the world who had this kind of strength. But the thin, scraped face among the equipment was not the face of anyone he knew.
“Now, who are you, my darling?” Gladys wondered aloud. Her fat, freckled hands fastened on the girl’s free arm, tenderly, gently. Her breathing grew heavy as she concentrated. “She’s come from a long way away,” she said. “Bad, bad. That car that ran into her crushed her in all down the other side, poor dear, and they haven’t given her enough painkiller, the fools. There. There, Auntie Gladys has put in a few blocks for you, my love, so you can spend your strength on getting well.” She turned over her shoulder to mouth at Mark, “What do you make of the color of her?”
Mark considered. The scraped, half-raw little face had the mauvish tinge of someone badly in shock. Carefully avoiding the abrasions, he put his hand to the sharp, unconscious corner of the girl’s jaw. Mordant blue-gray pulsed from the contact, sickening and strong enough to make his stomach heave. He removed his hand. “She’s been poisoned. It’s no kind of poison I know.”
“Me neither,” said Gladys. “Worse and worse. Those fool doctors haven’t even noticed. Give me your hand and we’ll see what we can do.”
She snatched his hand as she spoke. For a while they both concentrated in silence, drawing off the blue-gray sickening waves and feeding them to whichever of the various sumps would accept them, drawing again, casting the venom, drawing—until no more would be accepted.
“It was a massive dose, whatever it was,” Mark said, “and it’s antipathetic to most of the usual sumps.”
“They did their best,” Gladys said defensively. “So did we. Let’s see if it’s helped at all.” She tapped gently at the girl’s skinny arm. “Wake up, my darling. Auntie Gladys is here. Gladys is here to help. Wake up and tell Gladys what needs to be done for you, my love.”
The girl’s eyes had been half-open all along. Now, slowly, they were seeing. A weak but practiced consciousness played over first Gladys, then Mark.
“Friends, dear,” Gladys said.
They could tell that the girl knew that. Her mouth made a mumble. It sounded like “Thank goodness!” But Mark, moving automatically to another plane of being, interpreted it there and exchanged a look with Gladys. The girl had tried to say “Thank the Goddess!”
“And may She bless you too,” he said. “Where are you from?”
The girl’s mouth mumbled again. Gladys, tenderly holding the girl’s wrist in one hand and grasping Mark’s hand with the other, was forced to join Mark, and both had to move to a more distant plane before the sounds made sense. The girl manifested there as a little flame, flickering and guttering, but somehow fresh and sweet.
“The Ladies of Leathe,” the flame fluttered at them. “I wasn’t careful enough and my Lady Marceny found out—found out, my love, my love—it wasn’t done for the Brotherhood—it was wicked, wicked—and I tried to get away and warn you, my love—but I think she poisoned me—and they have traps out—I didn’t know and I was caught—and my love has no idea—I must warn—”
“Where were these nasty traps, my love?” Gladys asked. “Tell Gladys and she’ll take them apart.”
“Through every band of the Wheel,” flickered the flame. “Between the two of them.”
“But where?” Gladys insisted gently. “Where did you come from, my love?”
“Neighbors,” whispered the flame. It was down to a weak phut-phut now. “Next-door universe—the Brotherhood studies yours—but it was wicked—” The guttering light flared desperately. “I must warn him—”
And went out. On the pillow the eyes were still half-open but evidently saw nothing now. A green light that had been scribbling on a screen drew a straight green line.
“We’d best get out,” Gladys said briskly. “They’ll be along to see her any second.”
They passed the nurse hurrying that way as they went. Both of them made very sure they were not noticed either by her or by anyone else they encountered, until they came
to the parking lot, where the taxi driver was patiently reading a newspaper spread over his steering wheel. “Back home?” he asked Gladys. “That was a quickie.”
“It takes all sorts,” said Gladys. “And I can’t wave a magic wand over all of them.” The driver laughed.
Mark fell asleep on the way back, into dreams of drugs uneasily seeping and knives lancing, and did not wake until Gladys was heaving herself out of the taxi at her tumbledown gate.
“Well, how about that?” she puffed, somewhat triumphantly, as they walked up the muddy path. “The only way I slipped up was not seeing you and that poor girl were part of the same thing!”
Mark nodded. It had been proved to him over and over again that there was no such thing as coincidence in magic, but he still felt a kind of incredulous excitement, weary as he was. “You believe me now?”
“As soon as I set hands on her, I knew she wasn’t out of this world. Didn’t you feel the strangeness? It wasn’t just the strange poison either.”
Again Mark nodded. It was easier than confessing that touching the girl had told him nothing beyond the fact that she was poisoned.
Gladys shot a look at him as she unlocked her green door. “You’re going to lie down and sleep while I look into this. Where do I tell Paulie you are?”
“Birmingham,” he said. “The conference took longer than I expected. But she has to be able to get in touch with me there. I gave her a phone number. I’d better—”
“I’ll do it,” said Gladys. “It’ll be a bad day when I can’t tangle a few phone lines. She’ll get a hotel receptionist who’ll promise to give you the message. You get upstairs. There’s a bed for you in the room on the right.”
He stumbled his way gratefully up the shallow, creaking stairs, knowing there was some other anxiety in his mind, but almost too tired to place it. Traitors, he thought. Spies and traps. That was it. But he had warned Gladys. He could surely trust her to handle it. He found the room. He removed his jacket and shoes and fell on the bed, which proved to be as shallow and creaking as the stairs. He slept.