Deep Secret

  There had been a panel in progress here and this was now in total confusion. But at least, I thought as I sprinted amongst the milling audience, these people, as befitted fantasy fans, were reacting with amazement rather than panic. “Masquerade,” I told a large man with FANGS! on his T-shirt, who accosted me with questions. “Slight accident. Horse bolted.”

  “What a marvellous costume!” cried a small lady with OOOK on her shirt. “This has made my day!”

  Well that makes one of us! I thought. “Good. Great,” I gasped, zigzagging along the trail, giving out soothing cries of “Tomato ketchup! Masquerade!” as I went.

  No one seemed to have tried to stop the centaur. Probably just as well. Someone could have been kicked. The trail swerved to the far doors, in a speckle of crimson and a smallish red handprint, and out into the corridor beyond. I raced round leftwards after it, among mirrors and round a right-angle turn, along again and round, and then round two more corners. Too many right-angles. I swore as I ran. Someone had been messing with the node again. Finally I whirled into the area above the foyer again where the lifts were. The nearer lift had smears of blood on the door. Its door was shut and the green arrow indicated the lift was in use, going up. The hurt centaur seemed to have gone to ground in the lift. It was hard to blame him, but someone losing blood like that had to be in urgent need of attention. I rammed my thumb on the call button and started hauling the lift back downwards, Magid-fashion.

  It was seriously hard to haul. I was sweating with the effort and the lift was merely creeping down when Will panted up beside me, looking thoroughly distraught.

  “The centaur’s in there?” he gasped. I nodded. “You’ve got to get him down then,” Will said. “They hide away to die when they’re hurt bad.”

  “Then help me, damn you!” I snarled.

  “Sorry,” Will said. He clapped his hand rather tremulously over mine and we both hauled. The centaur was apparently an extremely powerful magic user. We had to pull madly for a while. Then the lift came down with a rush. Its door swept open. We stared.

  Maree and Nick Mallory were in there, supporting the centaur, one on either side. I am not used to centaurs. There was a moment when I saw a small bay horse with its head hanging down out of sight, wedged sideways across the lift, and its black tail swishing almost in my face, while its rider sat on the horse’s neck with one thin brown arm over Maree’s shoulders and the other arm held by Nick. The rider’s head was resting against Nick’s chest. Long black hair draped over Nick’s supporting hands. The human head was outlined against Nick’s shirt, Asian brown and exquisite in profile, and a large dark eye, almond-shaped and fringed with long black lashes, rolled sideways at us in terror. Though the face was larger than a human face all over, I think my first thought was, What a beautiful boy! Two beautiful boys. Nick, though he was much paler-skinned, had the same sort of dark good looks.

  Then things snapped into focus. Horse and boy became one being, with a lot of blood on the lift floor. Maree jabbed at her glasses and raised her chin across the centaur’s bowed back. “I’m a trainee vet,” she said. “We were trying to get him to my room for first aid until you two fools interfered.”

  “Take him to my room,” I said. “It’s nearer the lifts.” I hauled Will in behind me and wedged us both into the lift alongside the centaur. Will jabbed the button marked 5 and we shot upwards at an unholy speed. “Will hit him with his car,” I explained.

  “Then he’ll be horribly bruised too,” Maree said. “Shit.”

  The centaur’s head stirred against Nick’s chest. “Knarros sent me,” he said. He had a pleasant husky voice. “I was to come here because the Emperor’s dead.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’m the Magid in charge. You came to the right place.”

  The centaur became agitated at this. One rear hoof lashed the lift door and the husky voice cracked as he said, “You don’t understand! I have to fetch the right person! Knarros is forbidden to talk to anyone but the right person!”

  “Steady, steady!” Maree said. She sounded like Stan putting a stopper on me.

  I said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve arranged to go and talk to Knarros this evening.”

  That was all there was time for before the lift banged to a halt on Floor 5. And it was just like our current luck that, for the first time ever, there was quite a crowd of people waiting to go down. About half of them were already in costume for the Masquerade. I stared out at a towering papier-mâché and plastic alien, a gentleman in Tudor court dress, two young men in almost nothing but boots, basques and bras, a slender girl apparently clad in a bead curtain, and at ordinary people clustered among them.

  As Will and I edged out of the lift and Maree and Nick carefully manoeuvred the centaur round so that he could come out forward, all these people broke out cheering and clapping.

  “Excellent!” they shouted. “Fantastic costume! Never thought of hiring a horse!”

  Possibly this was because, as the centaur turned, his unwounded side was always towards them. The hurt side was towards me. Flaps of living horsehide hung down from it. I felt hurt too, with a terrible sympathetic soreness, and rather sick. At least the bleeding seemed to have stopped, although the lift floor was a marsh of blood. I slammed its door shut behind us all, sealed it Magid-fashion, and made sure that lift would not move from this floor until I was ready to deal with it. Will hurriedly brought the other lift up instead. The centaur was near fainting by this time. His hooves staggered and his legs splayed. Since the variously dressed folk getting into the other lift were all staring over their shoulders at him, Will said, smiling inanely, “He’s got to go away and practise, you know.”

  “Well done, Nick!” the alien said, bending to enter the lift. He seemed to have conflated the centaur and Nick, regardless of the fact that the two were side by side. I thought, as I passed Maree my room key and got under the centaur’s left arm in her place, that it was the clearest case I had ever seen of someone simply not believing their eyes.

  But Nick was highly annoyed by the confusion. He said, in an angry blare, “Before this, I thought the people at this con were the only ones I’d ever met who understood when things weren’t ordinary. But they’re just as bad as anyone.”

  Will took a look at Nick and decided that Nick was even more shaken than he was himself. He took over supporting the centaur’s right arm. “Everyone has limitations,” he said.

  “They can’t help it if they’re not all superbrains like you, Nick!” Maree snapped. She was looking vainly along the corridor for my room number. I remembered the extra right-angles I had sprinted round downstairs. I clenched my teeth and dragged everything back into place.

  “What’s up?” asked Will.

  “Someone keeps fooling with the node here,” I said.

  Maree made no comment. She just gave me an approving nod as the door labelled 555 slid to a stop in front of her, put the key in, opened it and took charge. “Oh good,” she said. “Lots of space. Nick, you belt off to my room and fetch my leather vet-case. Rupert, go and collect my kettle and any others you can and get them all full of boiling water – but first think of some way to keep him standing up. He looks as if he’s going to fall over and I can’t get at him if he does.”

  In mere instants, we were all flying about at Maree’s commands. Will and I dismantled the trouser-press on the wall and, by hasty Magid means, got it to act as a tall shelf-like table, so that the tottering centaur lad could rest his forearms on it. This he did, gratefully. His glorious brown features were all dragged out of shape by pain and he had begun shaking. While Will and I were growing the legs of the padded stool in front of the dressing-table, Maree put her hands on the centaur’s quivering arms. “I never caught your name, sweetheart.”

  “Robbios,” he answered. “Rob usually.”

  “Oh, not another Robbie!” she said.

  “Rob,” said the centaur. “Not Robbie.”

  “OK,” Maree replied. “Now, Rob,
I’m going to have to take a closer look at your side. I’ll do my best not to hurt you, but I can’t promise. No. Higher,” she said, as Will and I tried to slide the by-now tall stool under the centaur’s horse-body. “I don’t want him slumping if his legs give.”

  I left Will to elongate the stool and flew off for kettles. Some room doors were open and the rooms were still being serviced by a weary-looking chambermaid. I unscrupulously took kettles from the rooms she was not actually inside. Nick and I arrived back together to find Maree in the middle of what struck me as a most efficient and gentle examination of Rob’s flayed and gaping side. Nick looked, turned extremely white, and bolted for the bathroom. I crawled about finding places to plug kettles in. Will finally got Rob supported from underneath by the stool and backed away looking as bad as Nick. It finally dawned on me why Will had so suddenly given up his boyhood ambition to become a vet.

  Maree, on the other hand, seeming quite unmoved, finished her inspection and walked round to look at Rob’s face. He was leaning his head in his arms, in a tumble of straight raven hair, on top of the transfigured trouser-press. He turned his face to see her. “First the good news,” she told him. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Most of it’s your hide, but there’s skin damage underneath and a couple of muscles torn. We got the bleeding stopped in the lift, but it wasn’t from any of the really big blood vessels, so you aren’t going to lose any more blood. The bad news is that I’m going to have to stitch you. I haven’t got any local anaesthetic and it’s going to hurt.”

  Rob gave a little howl and a gulp. “I can manage.”

  “We could get him drunk,” I suggested, pointing to the cocktail fridge. “There’s whisky and brandy and vodka in there.”

  “Hm,” said Maree. “Rob, how do you behave when you’re drunk?”

  Rob said, muffled in his arms and his hair, “No, no – I can’t. I cry.”

  “That’s all right,” said Maree. “I just don’t want you violent. OK, Rupert.” She eyed Rob’s bulk, calculating its weight, which must have been twice mine, though he was, I suspected, rather small for a centaur. “Try two double whiskies for a start.” She then turned away, holding both bloodstained hands in the air, and commenced kicking at my bathroom door. “Nick! Nick! Come out of there! I need to get this blood off and then scrub up.”

  As Will opened the fridge and passed me a cluster of little bottles, Nick emerged, gazed at Maree’s fingernails, each one spiked with blood, and clung to the doorway, moaning.

  “Don’t be such a wimp!” Maree told him. “Come back in here and get those soapdishes loose for me. I’ll need them to sterilise things in.”

  Rob sniffed at the opened bottle I offered him and shuddered. “I – I can’t.”

  “Yes you can!” Maree commanded from the bathroom.

  “The boss says you’ve got to,” Will told him. “Come on. Drink up.”

  Between us we coaxed one and a half little bottles down him. Then Maree emerged, opened that leather case of hers and said, “Damn. I’ve got antibiotic powder but no antiseptic. Rupert—”

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  I caught up with the chambermaid just as she was wheeling her service trolley away. “What do you want it for?” she understandably wanted to know.

  “The Guest of Honour’s son has been a little ill,” I told her truthfully.

  “He isn’t the only one!” she said. “I think half the rooms up here were drunk last night. That’s why you’re lucky to catch me. That, and Maureen leaving because of that ghost playing music in the staff car park.”

  “Oh it’s not still doing it!” I groaned, and then bound to add prudently, “I saw everyone looking for it this morning.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Still at it. I mean, if it was pop, you’d know it was a car radio. But it’s always classical stuff. All tinkly.”

  “Then it has to be a ghost – I see what you mean,” I said sympathetically, wondering what I could do to Stan to stop him. “It is a bit much, I agree.”

  I came back with an armload of various disinfectants to a room thick with the steam from four kettles and the smell of blood and horse. Will and Nick were humbly arranging implements and thread in soapdishes, cups, saucers and the lid of my silver shaving kit. There were now three empty little bottles in front of Rob. His face looked healthier because of the warmer brown flush to it. Maree stood among it all with a pair of scissors.

  She accorded me an approving nod. “Good. Thanks.” Snip, went the scissors. Snip, snip. Pieces of long yellow fingernail flew across the steamy room. “Bring those disinfectants into the bathroom and I’ll show you how to scrub up properly. There must be all sorts of bugs in this world that Rob’s system isn’t used to and I’m not taking any chances.”

  I saw that I had been volunteered for nurse-attendant. It was fair enough, considering the state Will and Nick were both still in, but I had got by so far only by carefully not looking at Rob’s left flank, and I was not at all sure I could manage.

  “Come along!” barked Maree, disposing of her last fingernail. Snip!

  “Yes’m,” I said.

  She caught my eye and grinned at me. “Sorry.” In the bathroom, she confided in a whisper, “This is the first time I’ve done anything like this. I’m nervous.”

  “You could have fooled me!” I said. She pushed her glasses up and gave me a proper smile at that. It made me as warm as the flush on Rob’s face. I began to feel that it was worth being volunteered, if it meant that Maree was starting to approve of me a little.

  Shortly, we were all set to go, Maree in the one surgical mask she happened to have in her case, her hair tied back in my hand-towel and her newly manicured hands in rubber gloves; and me with one silk cravat over my lower face, a second round my head like a turban, and her other pair of rubber gloves.

  As we went over to Rob to start, someone knocked on the door.

  “Don’t anyone answer it,” I mumbled through the cravat.

  But the door opened, in spite of being still locked. Zinka stuck her silky brown head round it. “Ah,” she said. “I thought it wasn’t just a costume. Hello, Will! Rupert, is this beginning to be an emergency, or what?”

  “It’s more or less under control,” I said. “But I would be grateful if you could do something about the lift. It’s full of blood and I had to fix it on this floor until I could see it.”

  “Can do,” Zinka said cheerfully. “I’ll do it at once – people are grumbling. What did you use to stick it here?”

  “Just a fairly strong stasis,” I said.

  “Consider it unfixed,” Zinka said, and went away.

  The door snapped shut and Maree got down to work. Rob flinched, gasped and took his head off his hands in order to grip the trouser-press so that his fingers turned grey-white. Will and Nick flinched too and both hastily went to sit on my bed, where they could not see exactly what Maree was doing. They stayed there more or less the entire time, only moving reluctantly when Maree commanded one of them to bring me the saucer with the ligatures, or the stuff in the cups. The first time Will sat down again, he sprang up almost instantly. “Oh help,” he said. “I clean forgot them!” and felt carefully in the pockets of his large rough jacket. He brought out two yellow fluffy handfuls that cheeped faintly. “Orphan quack chicks,” he explained. “I meant to leave them at home.”

  “Biscuits over by the kettles,” I said, holding the saucer out to Maree.

  Nick and Will fed the chicks crumbs on my duvet. At least this gave Rob something to watch. I wondered how he could bear it without screaming. I said to Maree, “This looks worse than your aunt’s jumper.”

  She said, busy with little tiny stitchings, “Yes, I thought she’d cut her breast off for a moment.” Then we both came-to a little and said simultaneously, “Sorry, Nick.”

  “Why?” said Nick. “I thought it was hideous too. I don’t have to like it just because she’s my mother, do I?”

  Rob gave a throaty yell.

  ?
??Fetch him some more whisky, Nick,” Maree said. “And talk if you can, Rob. It’ll take your mind off this. Talk about this dead Emperor. I want to know.”

  So Rob talked. He leant on the trouser-press, with his face periodically twisted in pain, talking, talking. No doubt the whisky helped him to babble, but I think he was also a naturally garrulous person. I could rather easily imagine him in happier times cantering around with his friends and chattering until those friends told him, “Oh do shut up, Rob!” And it was curiously memorable, that young husky voice talking on and on as Maree worked and, every so often, breaking into a squawk when Maree dragged another piece of his hide into place.

  Much of what Rob said was well known to me, if not to the other three, but not all of it. I remember him saying, “The Emperor has three grades of wives, you know. It used to be just two, True Wives and High Ladies, and they all lived with the Emperor in the Imperial Palace, but this Emperor – I mean, he’s dead now, I keep forgetting – Timos the Ninth, had a third grade just called Consorts and he didn’t regard them as important enough to live with him. Knarros says that this Emperor has – had – a passion for grading everything. He graded the High Ladies and left gaps in the grading, in case he got new ones who ranked higher than the ones he had already. He never filled rank eight, but he had a nine and a ten. Of course he graded all the children he had by them too. Knarros has charge of that scheme, but he doesn’t have charge of children of lower grades. If he had, he said he’d never have let that one who was executed write to his mother like that. But Consorts’ children were always farmed out to people in quite humble circumstances a long way away from Iforion…”