“But you were on about supper and Amanda precogging all sorts of dire stuff,” Paulie interrupted. She was standing very upright and carefully straightening the bow of her retied sash, as if the annoyance in her voice had nothing to do with her body. “How am I supposed to sort all that out?”
“You only hear what you want to hear,” Mark observed, with the same teeth-clenched calmness. To Tod, listening, it was as if neither Mark nor Paulie was able, for some reason, to show the anger they felt. What stopped them, he had no idea, but whatever it was, he had a growing feeling—quite apart from the awkwardness of his own situation—that it was strange and wrong and terrible.
Tod had been in this situation once or twice before. He had also, many times, stood in the margins when his numerous brothers-in-law quarreled with his sisters. But he had not felt so threatened by anything since he spent that time in Leathe. He could not understand it. “I told you,” Mark went on, in the most calm and domestic way, “that I am worn-out too, and I asked you to drive us both to Herefordshire because I’m tired enough to have an accident. I thought you agreed. The idea was that you’d have some food ready to take—because you know how I hate Gladys’s pies—and we’d pick it up and be on our way. I’m ready. I left the car running. And I find you aren’t even dressed.”
“You may have had all that clear in your head,” Paulie retorted, motionless as a statue, “but you didn’t make it clear to me. I don’t read minds, Mark. If you’d made yourself clear, I wouldn’t have invited Roddy round. Mark, this is Roddy.”
Mark turned to Tod and looked at him, truly, Tod thought, as if he had not noticed him until then. Tod’s sense of danger increased tenfold. The feeling of Leathe grew. Mark was, as most men were, considerably taller than Tod, and Mark was, after all, the husband Tod had been about to injure—which was awkward enough and put Tod at a disadvantage enough—but, as Mark’s gray, dispassionate eyes met his, Tod saw that the man was also a powerful mage. It was enough to make Tod, by reflex, call up his birthright. To his slight surprise, the birthright was half-roused already, waiting for his call. Maybe the feeling of Leathe, lurking between these two people, had been enough to trigger it.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Mark said.
“Oh, I doubt it,” Tod replied merrily. “I’m a total stranger in these parts. I—”
“Roddy is Tony’s brother,” Paulie interrupted. “You remember Tony, Mark? I’ve just been telling Roddy how Koppa and I found you wandering around London and took you in.”
That, Tod thought, was unneccessary. It was the remark of a complete bitch. His birthright felt Mark wince at it, though Mark gave no outward sign. The man was probably bleeding inwardly from a thousand such snide, wounding things. A great desire came upon Tod to be away from all this, out of the cloying poison of Leathe, not have anything more to do with these people.
“If you don’t mind,” he said firmly, “I’ll be getting along now. Nice to have met you—Paulie—Mark.”
Neither of them suggested that he stay. Neither even made a polite noise. They were locked in combat with no time to spare for Tod.
“Well. Good-bye,” Tod said. He left them standing there and got out of the house with long strides. His birthright told him that, in order to do so, in order just to make it through the front door, he went bursting through wards and barriers of truly formidable magework. The space in front of the house door was blocked now by a car that was presumably Mark’s. More barriers. Tod burst those too, dodged around the car, and fled to the pavement at the head of the short drive, where he stood breathing deeply and trying to recover what Arth and otherworld between them had left of his poise.
The footpath, and the road with it, was slightly raised above the ground where the houses stood. It was as if Tod were for a moment standing with his legs astride on top of otherworld—his birthright tended to give him this effect when it was roused. Now it served to show him that he had had enough of the place. He hated everything he had seen here, and Paulie most of all. There was no way he was going to do the High Head’s bidding and become Paulie’s lover. He would be sick. He was sick. He had to swallow. The homesickness that had overcome him in the center of town rose up in him and clamored.
“Damn it all to hellspoke!” Tod said. “I’m going home.”
To make this quite clear to himself, he fished the key to Brother Tony’s lodgings from its tight pocket and deliberately dropped it down a grating at his feet. Some kind of drain, he supposed. As the key clattered away, he felt nothing but relief.
“That settles it then,” he said.
Nobody had told him the thing was impossible. Nobody had even told him he was forced to serve out the rest of his service-year here—though the High Head had evidently intended that. But the High Head had clearly forgotten the little matter of Tod’s birthright. Tod had forgotten it himself. Brainwashed by Arth, he thought. Arth preferred not to know about magework outside its own control, and Tod had tried to be a good citizen of Arth. He was a little astonished at himself now. He had tried to be good. They would not let him. So he had better go home and put himself under August Gordano’s powerful protection. August would fight tooth and nail for his heir if necessary.
When he thought about it, Tod was slightly ashamed of running and hiding behind his daddy’s coattails. He always was when he did it, but it never stopped him doing it. And to justify him on this occasion, there was the peculiar business of Zillah and his realization that she came from this place. If that ritual really had given the High Head a line through to Tod’s mind, then the sooner he got where this information was not available to Arth, the better. But let’s see.
Tod let his birthright gather and then reached out and examined this thread. Reaching into the Wheel was curiously difficult to do. Either he was out of practice or otherworld was not a place where magework came easy. But the thread existed, all right.
Tod recoiled as the High Head himself took up the thread and came through to Tod’s mind. Damn. So delicately set up, I jogged the swine’s mind. Your report please, agent. Tod had the sense of another day at least having passed in Arth—time did indeed run strangely between universes—and the High Head well rested but slightly irritable from a rich breakfast, and exceedingly worried behind that in a way he was careful to keep hidden from Tod. Whatever this worry was, it served to distance Tod’s affairs. The High Head was now able to regard him as just another agent in the field.
My report? There was no reason in any world to tell the sod the truth. Tod instantly set about misleading him. Contact has been made, sir, satisfactorily to both parties, and I’ve also become very friendly with the husband. By the way, sir, the man has powers rather in excess of yours. Tod had no idea if this was the case, but he saw no harm in usettling Arth a bit.
I suspected as much, the High Head’s thought came, heavy and irritable. So what’s he up to?
Something very crucial, Tod thought back glibly. There’s a being called Gladys I haven’t met yet, who’s even more powerful, and we’re all just off to do important magework with her. I’ll let you know what when I’ve seen it, sir.
Good work, agent. The old female is of great interest to us. Was there any mention of another called Amanda?
I don’t think so, Tod lied, while his mind made rapid connections. Mark had been talking about her—Zillah’s sister.
When you do come across her, I’d like a report on her too. My usual source on her is temporarily out of action.
Of course, Magus, Tod thought unctuously, while vowing that no one who was an analogue of his favorite aunt was ever going to be given over to Arth.
To his relief, the High Head dropped the thread then. Tod felt him turn to pick up another, belonging to some other poor Brother in the field. He felt unclean. Hateful to have that fellow in your head. But quick. Now, while the swine was complacently turning elsewhere. Tod reached into the Wheel again and carefully, delicately, nipped that thread apart. The effort left him quite unusually d
rained, but it was worth it. Let the High Head try looking for him now. The next thing was to consider the best way to get home before the High Head started looking.
Tod raised his birthright in a new direction and was more than a little daunted to find how well defended the Pentarchy was—it was as if a great thorny wood filled with booby traps grew between here and there. But the luck of the Fiveirs was with him. His mind’s eye caught what looked like a possible way through, accessible from here. The real problem was the strange difficulty there seemed to be in mageworking. Tod felt exhausted just looking. He began to see that otherworld was in fact much less benevolent to magecraft than his own world. Perhaps that was the main difference between them. In order to get through that wood, he was going to need to be in, or near, a place of power. He ignored the weariness and searched for such a place.
There was none near. The nearest he could feel was miles away, north and west of here. That was all right. He had transport, courtesy of Arth. He jingled the car keys in his pocket and looked down the driveway with disfavor. There stood Brother Tony’s motley little monster, nose-down beside Mark’s sleek gray job. Mark’s was a real car. It might not have been in the same league as the beloved Delmo-Mendacci, but it was a good, classy vehicle all the same. The contrast was pitiful.
Tod walked slowly down the drive, tossing the keys of the subcar in his hand. He was between the two cars when he realized that the engine of Mark’s car was running. So quiet! Marvelous. Of course, Mark had said he’d left it running. And considering the barriers of magework around it, there was probably no fear of someone making off with it. But Mark must, all the same, be incredibly heavily engaged in that family row of theirs, not to have come out to remove the keys, just in case. Tod himself would have done that first thing. Mark would get around to it any second now. In which case—
Tod did not hesitate. There was absolutely no moral struggle. He simply jammed his own keys into the ignition of the motley subcar and slid behind the wheel of Mark’s real one. An exchange, if not a fair one. Wards and barriers fell apart around Tod like so many cobwebs. The car smelled clean and new. Bliss. The seat adjusted to Tod’s shorter build with a sigh of power. It took him a second or so to discover how to get reverse, but he was backing smoothly up the drive by the time Mark arrived at the front door. Seeing the sober, pale figure emerge, and stand aghast, Tod gave him a cheerful wave as he swooped backward into the road. Then he put the lovely car into forward gear and surged away.
* * *
4
« ^ »
It could not really be sleep, not if she was to hold Joe for the length of time they might need in Laputa-Blish. Maureen continued to drag downward, into a place she had only heard of and never yet experienced, deep in the ether. Down and down.
Some time later they were hanging, still tightly wrapped together, in a place full of whorls of feeling and shadows of color, where everything seemed a sick sepia to the taste, and motes like sticky dust rained into their hearing. Things wrong and bad lurked in the corners of the senses, or made little scuttling rushes, trailing gelatinous disturbance over the floor of the mind. Some of the things—Maureen had an image of just such a disturbance, with too many legs, nestling in the lap of a fat old woman, which was surely wrong, and bad. Nightmares, she thought. Perhaps this was a mistake.
Joe roused when she did—they were that closely involved. Oddly enough, he finished the sentence he had started when she caught him. “If you ask me, that was a con job too. I don’t think they can bring me back. What did you want to bring us down here for? This is a very bad part of the ether.”
“I know,” she said, or rather communicated, being bodiless here. “But tell me a better way to hold you. I had to get some sleep.”
She could feel panic writhe in him and be controlled. “It’ll be more than sleep you’ll get unless you know the way out. Our bodies could starve to death. Do you know how to get out?”
“No,” she confessed. “I was desperate. I—”
“You never think, do you? You’re worse than I am.” She felt him consider. “I had lessons in this. I should remember. Yes. The first thing to do is we make ourselves bodies here, or we lose what little we’ve got left. Come on, woman, concentrate! Imagine you’ve got your usual body.”
Maureen did so. Joe’s carefully controlled panic assured her it was urgent. She pushed her answering panic away and thought of herself, her body, as she knew it. Long legs, slender, shapely back—particularly nice firm buttocks—thin, strong arms, small breasts, her neck, the sweet line of jaw, her hair, which she loved for its color, her own freckled, wide-eyed face. Toes. Long fingers. Elegant flat belly.
And it came into being, nebulously, as she succeeded in visualizing it. Joe also assumed a form, almost at the same time, but she noticed that he had edited himself so that he no longer had that heavy, coarse look to his face. She could see little else but his face, for they were still entwined, because that was how their minds were, arms around each other, leg wrapped into leg, as closely as lovers.
“You’ve made yourself prettier,” he told her. “Your face usually looks much more like a camel’s.”
“So have you. You usually look like a thug,” she retorted. “What now?”
“Unwrap me.”
“No way! You’ll scoot and leave me here.”
“You’re dead right, you bitch! Unwrap, or neither of us moves.”
“Stuff that!”
It was another deadlock. They hung there in the senseless sepia nowhere, gazing each over the other’s shoulder at scuttling whorls of nightmare. When a disturbance came uncomfortably close, one or the other would push or pull or tug sideways, and their combined bodies would drift away in a new direction. It was timeless. They could already have been there twenty years. Our bodies are probably long dead, Maureen thought.
“Of course they aren’t. You never did have a sense of time!” Joe snapped at her.
My thoughts are not private anymore, Maureen realized.
“That’s your own stupid fault—Hurl’s balls! Look out! Upwards!”
Maureen looked and found a huge and regular disturbance approaching. Overhead, the fabric of everything was dented and pounded inward, as if a company of four-legged giants were marching towards them across a hammock made of thin veiling. The sepia was trodden to sick pink in bulges. And whatever the giants really were, they were striding straight for their two enwrapped nebulous bodies.
Both pushed and pulled frantically to get out of the line of advance, but the striders seemed to sense their presence and altered their course to follow. Closer and closer, until Maureen caught a whiff of their nature—something wild, but harnessed by a malevolence that had its origin in this place. Closer still. The malevolence almost unbearable, right on top of them. As the leading monstrous dent came bulging down upon them, Maureen freed her arms, scarcely knowing what she did, and pushed, hard and desperately. Joe’s arms were free too. He stretched up and heaved at the thing’s underside. Between them, they caught the strider at one side. That seemed to unbalance it. It, and the bulges that followed it, appeared to stumble and tip, and then veer ever so slightly. Maureen tilted her head and watched the whole train of striders pace off into sepia distance at an angle to the two of them.
As the striders went, a vision came to Maureen, not of this place, and not of anything she knew. Things were striding in the vision, too, but these things were metal towers, giant sized, that were marching over grass against a stormy sky. As they strode, the metal things trailed a wild, unharnessed malevolence that seemed akin to the striders, but with that they also trailed arcing, crackling blue violence. Killing violence.
She threw her arms around Joe again, not holding him now, but hugging him for what comfort she could get. “What the hell were those?”
He was scarcely articulate and clung to her as hard as she clung to him. “A sending—bad one—really strong—ye gods! Wild magic—the size of it!—right down through half the Wheel—
How have we made someone that angry?”
* * *
5
« ^ »
Your lover,” said Mark, “has just stolen our car.” Paulie, now hurriedly dressed in stretch-nylon trousers and an Arran sweater, paused in filling the thermos. “He is not my lover. I never saw him before today.”
Mark discerned that she was telling the truth. “Then why did you have him in the house?”
“He’s Tony’s brother—I told you.” Before Mark could make any comment about Tony, Paulie swung to counterattack, with the thermos clutched to her sweater as if it were her injured name. “You watched him steal the car, and you didn’t try to stop him! I suppose it didn’t occur to you that you’re the most powerful magician in this country. You could have stopped him in his tracks if you’d thought to use your power.”
“I did think,” said Mark, “and I did try. Whoever he is, he turns out to have more power than I have. By some way. He brushed me off like a fly—along with all the wards on the car.”
“But he’s only small!” Paulie said naively. “Though I suppose he is chunky.”
“Size doesn’t enter into it,” Mark said contemptuously. “Some children have more power than you do.”
“Then I suppose you’d better call the police,” she said.
“I already have,” Mark replied. ‘They may just catch him—but what’s really worrying me is that I mentioned Gladys in front of him, and I can feel him heading her way. Do you know anything at all about him—what his intentions are, or whether he’s into the black stuff in any way?”
Paulie put the thermos to her mouth in dismay. “No. I told you. I only just met him.”
“Then we’d better follow him,” said Mark. “Quickly. Get that food and come along.”
“How? Do we hire a car? Or walk?”
“As he’s had the extreme generosity to leave us a Deux Chevaux in exchange for the BMW, we might as well use the thing,” said Mark.