“How old are you, Rob?” Will asked kindly.
“Eighteen,” Rob said, on a deep groaning sob.
That was old enough for Rob to find a life of his own, I thought, so long as his outlook had not been permanently narrowed by his austere upbringing in that colony.
“And you did say you had other family to go to?” Will asked.
Rob nodded. Rob took to Will, I could see. Will was the rough, but subtle and kindly, countryman type that centaurs most appreciated. “My mother’s still alive,” Rob said, with another sob. “But – but she’s never been well since she had me.”
I could see he felt guilty about this. I sighed, both because the guilt was so pointless and because I saw I was going to have to be the hard man of this interview. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could Will said, “And your father, Rob? Is he still alive?”
Rob’s chin came up. His hand went to that gold medallion of his and his still tear-filled eyes stared proudly into Will’s earnest ones. “My father is dead,” he said. “He was the Emperor.”
That confounded me. I had been thinking along quite other lines and this threw all my ideas about. Will looked as confused as I felt. “Then,” Will said rather feebly, “your mother and Knarros must be from a very good family.”
“From the highest bloodlines,” Rob agreed proudly.
We sat and stared at this hurt and desolate centaur prince for a moment. Then I said, “Rob, there are some other things connected with your uncle’s death that I think you ought to—”
There was a strong thumping from behind me, from outside my door. Whoever it was could not get through Will’s warding and was not able to knock on the door. They seemed to be pounding on the carpeted floor of the corridor instead. Presently there were shouts, muffled and distant at first, then stronger and clearer as the man outside discovered how to project his voice through the layers of protection.
“Venables, Venables! Venables, do you hear me?”
The fact that I could hear him was alarming. He seemed to have done it by sliding his voice through Will’s working and latching on to my own, more normal, warding beneath. That took great skill and a lot of power. My first thought was to pretend I hadn’t heard. One often only knows that a magic has worked when people react to it. I looked at Will, and then at Rob, to warn them to keep quiet. And it was clear Rob had recognised the voice. His head was up. He looked as if he was about to shout back, then thought better of it.
“Venables!” It was a strong yell.
“Who is it?” Will asked Rob, genuinely not knowing.
“Gramos,” said Rob. He was surprised and puzzled. “He lives in Thalangia. Why is he here?”
“Gram White,” I said. “He lives here too, Rob.”
“Venables! I know you’re there! Answer me!” White yelled. “I shan’t go away until you do!”
“Answer him. Get rid of him,” Will muttered.
I projected my voice back, pretending to be sleepy. “Hello. What is it?”
“You’ve got Nick Mallory in there, haven’t you?” White shouted.
“No I haven’t,” I replied, with some truth. “Why?”
“His mother’s worried about him,” yelled White.
I shouted back, again with some truth, “I don’t know where Nick is. Why the hell should I know? But tell Janine I’ll tell Nick she wants him if I see him.”
White did not believe me. He made some kind of threat, in a lower voice, about what he would do if I was lying. Then he stood outside the door muttering for a bit. After that he seemed to go away. I felt through the warding after him, and it seemed to me that he did genuinely walk away down the corridor. But I didn’t speak until I was sure.
“Rob,” I said, “was it Gram White your uncle was expecting this afternoon? The kids at the gate were waiting for someone. And Knarros didn’t come and speak to me until he’d had time to take the magework off the path.”
“Yes,” said Rob, beginning to look alarmed. “Gramos was expected.”
“And Janine too – Nick’s mother?” I asked.
Rob gave me one of his limpidly honest looks. “It was the Empress Jaleila who was expected,” he said. “She is my aunt. Gramos is her brother.”
“But this Empress is Nick’s mother,” I insisted.
“Yes,” Rob admitted.
“Hang on. I don’t get this!” Will said. “The Koryfonic Empire doesn’t ever have an Empress.”
“The title is taken, in the event of the Emperor’s demise, by the Emperor’s sole surviving consort,” Rob told him, evidently reciting a law.
“Then I think the title should be taken by the High Lady Alexandra,” I told Rob. “Janine – Jaleila – is merely a Lesser Consort, isn’t she?”
“I had no idea the High Lady had survived!” Rob prevaricated.
“Isn’t she?” I insisted. “Jaleila, Nick’s mother, a Lesser Consort?”
“Yes,” he said. “But—”
“Rob,” I said. “Please. Listen to the rest. These two came into the compound and one of them promptly cut the throats of the two lads and then shot the little girl, while the other tried to shoot me and then shot your uncle. Then—”
“Was Kris all right?” Rob asked urgently.
“They sent him away,” I said. Rob visibly relaxed. I went on, “And after he and I discovered the bodies, Kris went off down through the wood, where he seems to have come upon Gram and Janine a moment or so after they stripped Maree. I gather Kris raised an outcry…”
Rob all but smiled. “Yes, Kris is very honest. Nobody told him anyth—” He stopped and looked anxiously at my face. “What else happened?”
“Kris was next seen,” I said, “running for his life, with Janine chasing him in Maree’s car, while Gram fired at him out of its window.”
“What?” Rob’s front hooves hit the floor and he was half upright before the pain of his side checked him. “What?” Tears welled from his eyes again. “But Gramos is Kris’s father! Gramos shot him?”
“It’s all right,” I said. “We think Kris escaped. Stan – the witness – says Kris jumped like a bird into the nearest vineyard.”
Rob subsided slowly back on to the bed. “Well, thank all the gods for that!”
“Hang on. Here’s another thing I don’t get,” Will put in. “Why are you so worried about this Kris? You didn’t turn a hair when Rupert told you the three kids you were brought up with had had their throats cut.”
“You didn’t bother much about Maree either, did you?” I said. “It doesn’t seem to mean anything to you that she sewed you up.” I said it much more angrily and bitterly than I had expected to. I had to gulp back a sob as I said it. It took me by surprise.
Rob was taken by surprise too. “But,” he said, bewildered, “why should I care? None of them was our bloodline.”
Will was – spontaneously and totally – disgusted. He got up, he kicked the frilly chair aside and he shot Rob a look of sheer contempt, and then turned his back on him. The quack chicks picked up on Will’s feelings and scooted for cover under the wheelchair. Will said, “Of all the – the – the – I can’t think of a vile enough word, frankly!”
Rob stared at Will’s back. I could see dismay growing in him. He had, as I thought, very much taken to Will. “You mean,” he asked huskily, after a moment, “you think I should care?”
Will whirled round. “Of course you should bloody well care!” he yelled. The force of it made the tiny flames on the candles flicker. “What kind of a way have you been brought up? Three kids and a young woman get murdered and all you can say is they weren’t your bloody bloodline! And damn it all, that’s not even true! The Emperor was their father as well as yours! They were your brothers and sisters, Rob!”
Rob flinched and looked down at the duvet. After another pause, he said, “Yes, I suppose they were.”
“Hark at him!” Will said to me. “He supposes they were! That’s accessory to murder talking, that is!”
The
whole of Rob shook with a sudden deep sob.
“You do cry easy!” Will began again. “You—”
“Give him a break, Will,” I said. We seemed to have changed roles, Will and I, me to the soft man, Will to the hard. “He’s been brought up to consider only the offspring of Knarros’s two sisters, as I see it. And Janine as White’s sister, I imagine, with the Emperor linking them again. Is that right, Rob? You consider Nick’s the next Emperor, don’t you?”
Rob nodded. He clearly could not speak.
“Gah!” said Will. “Upbringing nothing! He’s got a mind. He’s mage-trained. That means he’s got to have a mind of his own. Come to that, why doesn’t he consider himself as the next Emperor? He’s the Emperor’s eldest surviving son, isn’t he?”
Rob looked up in genuine, huge astonishment. “But I’m a centaur!”
“So? said Will. “Racist too, are we, as well as conniving at murder?”
“I—” said Rob. He swallowed, and the gold pendant bobbed on his smooth throat. “I didn’t see it that way. I swear.”
His wonderful features were twisted with sincere misery. I could see he really had not, before this, considered his part in today’s horrors. Well, neither had I. I hadn’t done so well either. I had contrived to keep Dakros away from the colony so that White could do his dirty work in peace. Rob and I had both been manipulated. “You might as well,” I said, “tell us what you really did say to Nick and Maree in the lift.”
Rob shrugged. “I said we were all the Emperor’s children, of course. I knew Nick because he looks like me, only paler. And he was wearing his medallion under his shirt, so there was proof. Maree said hers was somewhere in the junk in her room. She—” He was beginning to look happier, talking around and beside the actual message he had been sent to give. I coughed, to remind him. He shot me a look which, to do him justice, was full of sober guilt. “I – I had to tell Maree that Knarros wanted to see her,” he said, “because she was the Emperor’s eldest child and ought to take the throne.”
“What did she say?” I asked with strong curiosity.
“She said she’d go and tell Knarros to get stuffed,” Rob said.
I could imagine that. “For what reason? No, don’t tell me. Because she was going to be a vet.”
Rob grinned, a wondrous, rueful smile, on one side of his mouth. “No. She said she wanted to be a Magid.” Will and I both stared at him. “Honestly,” he said. “We were arguing about that when you pulled the lift down. I said she could be a Magid and—”
His head jerked round towards the far end of the rows of candles.
There were sounds there, from out of sight where the road dipped downhill. Will and I shot one another tense, incredulous looks. This quick? We could hear pebbles clinking, panting and fast footsteps, coming closer. Someone was definitely coming up. We waited, staring at the spot where we thought we might first see that person’s head come into view. We had all been far too preoccupied to have noticed anyone approaching along the more distant parts of the road, but I thought, from memory, that when Will had exploded my eye had been catching a faint flicker of motion out there.
We were all watching the wrong spot. It took us all by surprise when Nick hurled himself between the candles and along the carpet and stood there, bent over, panting like a train.
“What happened?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Where’s Maree?”
I think we all spoke at once, but Nick answered me. “Left – left her at the bridge,” he gasped. “Too far for her – here and back. She’s OK. Livelier – you know.” He stopped and panted loudly. “There’s this bridge,” he said, when he was breathing easier, “and it’s got these rather weird guardians. They won’t let us through because we didn’t – didn’t bring the right stuff. They said go back and find another verse. So I came.”
“Damn!” said Will. “Another verse? How?”
“Zinka!” I said. I jumped up, much to the consternation of the quack chicks. “I’ll go and find her.”
“The candles,” Rob said.
Nick, now kneeling between the rows like a spent Olympic sprinter, echoed Rob. “Yes, the candles.”
They were right. The candles would be burning lower every minute we took finding the missing verse. But we dared not blow them out while Maree was still out there. “Suppose,” I said, “we were to put them out all but the two nearest the road? Do you think that would be enough to keep the road still there, Will?”
“Might work,” Will agreed. “If we start from the end by the door and keep checking. I’ll do it. You find Zinka.”
I left at once and pelted to the lifts, which White’s recent activities outside my door had now set four corners away. The lift which arrived first was the one where Rob had been. It was not working very well. It went down in fits and jerks and stopped entirely at Floor Two. I could sense Zinka further down, but I had not the time to spend working on the lift. I stormed out and set off down the stairs at a gallop.
The roar of voices and singing hit me at the first landing. As I barged aside the fire door and swung on down, I saw why. There was a party going on. Almost the entire last flight of stairs was full of people, partying busily, drunkenly, uproariously and, in some areas, orgiastically. It looked rather fun.
Sitting on the top stair, more or less beside where I stood and detached from the rest, was Kornelius Punt. He raised a toothglass to me solemnly. “I am trying,” he told me, “to sort out one body from the next on these stairs and not succeeding.”
“They are rather entwined,” I agreed. I looked at the party. I looked down at him sadly. One of the underlying reasons why I had assumed that Punt might make a Magid was that he held himself apart from the rest of humanity. In fact, he was just a voyeur. I was the one who held myself apart, and it was not necessary, or right. It was probably why I had made such a mess of things. “Why don’t you join in?” I said to Punt.
“I am always aloof,” he told me. “I am going for Loof of the Year Award.”
Zinka was down on the stairs somewhere. “You’ll probably win it,” I said. I started picking my way down the packed and roaring stairs. I could only advance most of the time by holding on to the wall while I worked one foot, then the other, between thighs and arms or under hands and torsos. I caused several yelps of pain. I knocked over several glasses and a china bottle of the strongest liquor I had ever met. The fumes made me gasp and cough, but left the six people packed in beside it quite unmoved.
I apologised. One of the six said, “Damn, I think the stair carpet’s dissolving!” as I was making a long stride to a tiny space two stairs down, and they all laughed.
A hand came out of the writhing bodies lower down and passed me a full glass of rum. I accepted it politely and realised as I did so that the hand was the much-nicked mauve hand of Milan Gabrelisovic. Good. Great, in fact. But I did not trust him not to try poisoning me as a witch. I clambered through a nest of twining legs and passed the glass to the hand that came waving out from among them. Possibly it was Tansy-Ann Fisk’s. Below this, a vastly tall and shapely young man was spread out over at least eight stairs, with girls attached to him at intervals. The young man was wearing nothing but a leather loincloth and seemed to be asleep. The girls were drawing on him with felt-tip pens. Two of them were giving him a sunburst on his chest, in a riot of reds and yellows. His arms were being given hearts and anchors on one side and diagrams on the other. Zinka was at work on his left thigh, twining it with delicately drawn vineleaves. She was wearing a slithery silk gown that shone two delicious shades of rose and tended to slip fetchingly off her plump left shoulder, and she was wholly preoccupied. I could tell that, while the other girls were just drawing on the man, Zinka’s vine trellis was intended, gently and temporarily, to make the fellow hers later that night.
It seemed a shame to spoil her fun, but the candles were burning down. I bent and took hold of her warm, slithery shoulder. “Zinka, I’m sorry to—”
Sh
e jumped and looked up. “Oh God, it’s an emergency, isn’t it? Rupert, I am sorry – I had meant to check before I… I could tell something was up. Come on.”
She stood up and took my hand, towing me on downwards. I would rather have gone up, but down was nearer and easier. Together we negotiated a fairly extreme orgy and then forced our way between a row of ten people swaying on the lowest step and singing. Then we had only to stumble among glasses and bottles into a clear space by the fire door.
“Tell me,” said Zinka.
I was aware of Kornelius Punt, up above, doing his trick of amplifying our voices. So was Zinka. She glanced up there and frowned at me and we both cast up at him the illusion of a different conversation – two different conversations. We were too hurried to co-ordinate them. Them Up There alone know what Punt thought we were talking about.
“It’s like this,” I said, and gave Zinka a rapid run-down of events.
“Babylon!” said Zinka. “Oh my lord, Rupert! You should have called me hours ago. Here’s my verse for a start—”
The fire door beside us whammed open. Mervin Thurless lunged through and stood looking up at the crowded stairs in huge disgust. “What a revolting display!” he said to us, as if he thought it was our doing. “And the lifts aren’t working. How the hell am I supposed to get upstairs?”
“Terrible,” I agreed, remembering in time that I was supposed to be a fan of his.
“Just pick your way up,” Zinka told him cheerfully. “Kick people. They’re all too drunk to notice.” She pulled me the other way, out through the fire door, adding, “Or some are. With any luck someone will kick you back!” By this time, we were in the relatively open space beside the lifts. “It’s all right,” she said, seeing me staring anxiously back at the doors. “I laid it on Thurless to go up through the party. And I think we need to be down here anyway for the kitchens. Here’s my verse: