After a while, the party made itself heard from down the passage outside, muffled by the wards round my room. I was glad of it. I was by that time thoroughly enmeshed in the kind of thoughts I had been warning myself not to think, and it helped to have the noise. It reminded me there was life beyond my room. I thought of Rob, buoyant, flashy, flimsy young centaur, with that sort of slave-child mentality that whines when things go wrong. “It’s not my fault! I didn’t mean to!” Rob expected adults to scold him. He preferred that, I suspected, to accepting a fault and blaming himself, but he would duck out of both if he could. Smiling limpidly the while, of course. It was probably the result of being brought up by that kingly granite statue, Knarros. Will had shamed Rob into better behaviour, but Will had only been at work on Rob for an hour or so, and Rob had had Knarros all his life. If the journey proved as hard as the rhyme suggested, I knew Rob would be the first to crack.
Then I thought of Nick. Nick’s personality seemed to me to run deeper, stronger and more complex than Rob’s. When Nick ducked out of things, he didn’t signal it in advance like Rob did. He just vanished. He was, I suspected, quite ruthless about it, and about what he himself wanted. I had no idea what Nick did want, really – except I was sure it was not to rule an empire – because Nick had a dark private core. Possibly he didn’t know what was in there himself yet. But he knew enough to duck out if that core was threatened. And he would. I knew that. Rob and Nick shared, deep in their genes, a very strong selfishness. It was the same selfishness that had made their common father set up the whole mad mess in the first place.
Maree seemed to me to have escaped that selfishness. It was one of the things I had come to like about her. One of the many things. I wished I dared hope there were things she had come to like about me. But I couldn’t think of any. I thought of Maree instead, fierce, droll, unhappy little fighter as she was. She saw deep into things. I wondered, though, if she saw deep enough into herself. It could be that, in that way, she was not selfish enough. People who regard themselves as sacred – like Nick and his father the Emperor – know when fighting is worth it and when it is not. I doubted that Maree did know. She could well hurl herself uselessly into something out there, and lose. She could equally well lose by not defending herself when she should do. And with only half of herself present, the loss could be fatal…
As I said, I was glad that the gruff roar and distant music of the party kept forcing itself on my attention. I made a strong effort to think of something else.
I thought of Janine and her brother Gram White, and their intentions. Long ago, Janine must somehow have persuaded Timos IX to let her go into exile in a strange world as guardian of her own son and of Maree, where Janine must rapidly have married Ted Mallory and equally rapidly got Maree adopted by Ted’s brother Derek. The Emperor let her go. She was only a Lesser Consort, and someone as paranoid as Timos must certainly have known she had ambitions. Furthermore, Janine’s son and Maree (whose mother must also have been a Lesser Consort, I imagined) were both embarrassingly older than the children of True Wives. The Emperor must have sent them off Naywards out of trouble with relief. He could not have realised, when he took care to become the brother-in-law of Knarros, and so ensure the centaur’s loyalty, that Gram White had then done the same three years later. The birth of the centaur Kris involved Knarros in a little dynasty and a further loyalty, to Janine this time. No, obviously the Emperor had not known, or he would never have put Knarros in charge of the other children.
So what happened then? Janine seemed to have waited until Nick was old enough to make a credible Emperor (though not old enough to defy her, one supposes), while White learnt to make and use projectile weapons. Before that, he must have been trained as a mage. They must both have been in constant touch with other people on Koryfos, and bided their time until they could organise that explosion in the palace. When the time came—
At this point I said, “Oh, God!” out loud. I had caused the timing of it. I had brought it to a head. I had started looking for Maree. I had told Janine’s two sisters-in-law that I was looking for Maree in order to give her a legacy. The one with all the children had actually phoned Janine and told her in front of me. On top of that I had written to Maree and told Janine herself! She must have known me for a Magid at once. People from Ayewards can always tell. I could imagine how that had struck Janine. For “legacy” read “birthright”. A Magid looking for Maree because Maree was now the Emperor’s eldest child. I had precipitated the explosion and caused the deaths of those three children, not to speak of countless others all over the Empire!
I groaned – howled, more like – with such force that Will rolled about grunting in his sleep.
I was about to make more noises when I fortunately remembered that there had, all along, been a strong smell of these things being Intended. In other words, I thought bitterly, those ruthless bastards in the Upper Room wanted certain things to happen in the Koryfonic Empire. So they set two connecting chains of action going and made sure the Magid in charge of both is a self-confident little bungler. Me. R. Venables. Led by the nose by everyone. Mistakes guaranteed to order. Gah.
The question was, what was the Upper Room Intending precisely? Did they really, truly want Gram White for the next Koryfonic Emperor? Because that was what they were going to get. Janine would reign as Empress Regent for a short while. White would establish himself as her indispensable sidekick until he was accepted as a fixture. Then it did not need Janine even to have an accident. It just took Nick to have one. Bingo. Gramos I. Or was I supposed to prevent this?
For the first time, I stopped feeling uneasy that I had so blithely – with the help of two living Magids and one disembodied, no less – sent all three remaining heirs to Babylon. I had no doubt that they were the only three living. White would never have left those two older girls alive if they had been a threat. He knew what he was doing, did White. After he had stripped Maree, he went after Rob. He had coaxed Nick out of my room in order to get Rob out too and get a shot at him. Janine would have told him Rob was in here. Ted Mallory told her. Probably half the convention told her. Smart operator, White. Doing better than R. Venables here.
Still, although it was an accident, I had sent Maree, Nick and Rob to the safest place there was. Except that they might not come back. With the working changed and disrupted halfway through, their chances of returning had halved. Heaven knows what mischief those two quack chicks had done.
Even if all went well… Here I saw the two candles threatening to flicker out. I was only just in time to light the next two. Since there was no way I should tread in the road marked out by the candles, lighting them involved running frantically down outside it to light the first, then back up in the near-dark to squeeze past the frilly chair, and down the other side to light the other one. A little parable of my activities to date, I thought. It was a great relief to find the dark sketch of landscape was still in existence, even so. But now the two furthest candles were out, it was nearer. The stony path and the sharply shelving hill had advanced a couple of steps into the room.
Hm, I thought. I squeezed round to the kettle and made coffee more or less by touch.
While the second pair of candles burned out, I thought mostly about what the hell I was going to tell Dakros when he came through on my carphone on Sunday morning. I seemed to specialise in letting Dakros down. I still hadn’t thought what to say to him when I lit the third pair of candles and made more coffee.
The party down the corridor took a new lease of life around the time I lit the fourth pair. I heard someone come out of another room and yell for quiet. It made no difference. The stony path now stretched halfway across the room, night-dark and slightly luminous, and I was glad of any interruption. I had been considering my faults. Not pleasant. I seem to combine a degree of self-confidence and extreme pride in my abilities as a Magid with a slightly pathetic tendency to rely on other people – Will and Stan for a start. I couldn’t decide whether my mistakes were
worse when I took advice, or when I went my own brash confident way. Maree’s ex-mother, Mrs Nuttall, had probably got me summed up right, even if she had thought I was someone else.
I wished I could relate to people more. But then I let them down. I hated that.
I relit the fifth pair of candles with rather more time to spare. Thoughts like these make you want to rove about, restlessly. The party had died to a mere mumble by then.
I sat down again and found myself thinking wretchedly about those three murdered children. I could have prevented that. True, I had been distracted, with magics to overcome and magics to perform, but I should not have been distracted. And if this was Intended, I thought the worse of the Upper Room. I kept seeing the kids’ clumsy sandals and their long, not over-clean hair so severely in pigtails. I saw their tense, puzzled, ignorant faces. There were minds behind those faces that had never had a chance to work. You could see that their minds had been kept as chilly, comfortless and walled in as that courtyard where they were made to live. It was a double prison. They had, almost certainly, never been allowed even to imagine any bright, warm, extraordinary thing beyond the little penned-in world they knew. It was like Maree’s Uncle Ted over his wobbly windows – here I found myself smiling at Maree telling me of this, angrily, over the bookstalls – except that these kids had not chosen to see only the distorted old glass. The glass was all they had been given. And, just when they might have had a chance to choose to look beyond, their lives had been ended.
For a short while there, I confess I cried like Rob.
Then I thought that Maree at least had had her chance to look beyond. I was glad of that. I took comfort from thinking of her and hoped she would forgive me for it. If she came back – if, if, if – something would happen because Maree had looked beyond. She was that kind of person. She would thrust her way beyond with angry fingernails. She had been confined, too, by the same dreary bush-goddess, but she had soldiered past. I hoped her life would be better now. I ached to let her have something better. I wanted her to come back more than I have ever wanted anything. Ever.
But the hours passed. The fifth pair of candles guttered down, and nobody came back.
I was definitely asleep in the frilly chair when I heard a noise.
Rupert Venables continued
It was inside the room. I heard a pattering, a sharp clink, and the sound of a stone rolling. I jumped awake.
The sixth pair of candles were well down, but not yet guttering. By their light I could clearly see the path stretching across the room and then the brow of the hill, tantalisingly at the dark end between the burnt-out candles. I could still see into the dark stretch of landscape beyond. I stared avidly at the spot where the path tipped downhill, clutching the sides of my chair, my legs braced ready to spring up.
There was a bit more pattering, slow and sedate. Then, to my utter astonishment, two birds walked over the brow of the hill and paused to stare around with bright sapphire eyes. Seeing the room, they turned to one another in evident satisfaction. Each gently nibbled at the broad blue bill of the other. Then they turned again and solemnly advanced. They were as big as geese. I could see they had large webbed feet, so they were aquatic birds, but no kind that I knew. I simply did not understand what they were doing here, until they came within the full light of the candles. Then I could see the blue plumage, glossy and dark on the wings and a shiny gentle azure on the breasts. They were Thule quacks, outsize Thule quacks. I had never seen quacks so large, or so healthy, or so obviously full of intelligence.
They came right up to me, where each solemnly stropped a beak on my trouser leg in token of friendship and then looked up at me with bright, distinctly humorous round eyes. How about this? they seemed to say.
“Good God!” I more or less shouted. “How about that!”
Will woke up at once. It was probably milking time by then anyway. “What?” he said slurrily. “Vendela been sick again?”
“No,” I said, laughing. “The quack chicks are back. Take a look.”
Will surged up, looked, rubbed eyes, grated hands on bristly face, looked again. “I don’t believe it!” he said. “How did they get so big?” He got up and came closer. The quacks turned to him and each dipped a head, almost as if they bowed. “Aren’t they glossy!” Will said. “What beauties! They look clever too. I think I shall have to make pets of these. I couldn’t possibly sell them.”
“No, I want them,” I said. “Can I, Will? Please?” The return of the chicks – and their metamorphosis – struck me as the best of good omens. I wanted the quacks for that, and for the fact that they had acknowledged me their friend. And if they were not an omen – well, I wanted them anyway. They were beautiful.
“Well, they’re not an Earth species,” Will said dubiously. “Still, you’ve got a breeding pair there. And they seem to like you. Why not?” He looked out into the dark land. “No sign of anything else out there?”
“No,” I said.
He surveyed me, and the remaining candles. “Get some sleep,” he said. “You look whacked. And you’ve still got nearly six hours’ worth of candles there. Or you should have. You’ve been letting them burn too high.”
I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to say I had superstitiously let the flames burn higher in hopes that this might help whatever went on out there. I didn’t want anything. I felt sick with anxiety and lack of sleep.
“Go on,” said Will. “I’ll watch.”
Reluctantly, I left the chair and took Will’s warm place in the bed. The quacks, to my pleasure, followed me and roosted on the duvet.
“That’s better,” said Will. “Mind if I use the last packet of tea?”
That was the last I heard for a while.
When I woke up, it was getting light outside. Will had left the curtains drawn, the better to see the road and the landscape. The room looked squalid and very strange, with bars of one kind of light coming round the curtains, two minute glimmers on the ends of the seventh pair of candles, and the grey, nebulous luminosity of the stony path, now reaching more than two-thirds of the way to the door. Light of day showed the landscape no less dark, but weirdly skewed, floating at an angle to the room. The quacks were asleep, each with its head tucked under its wing.
“I woke you because I think I saw something out there,” Will said tensely. He was leaning forward, staring.
I got up quickly and scrambled round beside him. The landscape looked straighter and more real from here. But I couldn’t see anything living out there.
“There,” said Will, pointing so that I could sight along his arm. “Coming down the hill.”
There was a glimmer. By God, there was a glimmer, steadily moving this way! I watched it crawl round a loop of the road, and then pelted to the bathroom, then to the kettle, where I discovered Will had drunk the last packet of coffee too. I could hardly grudge it him. When I got back to the frilly chair, the glimmer was out of sight.
“Coming pretty steadily,” Will said. “Shouldn’t be long now.”
We waited. Five minutes became ten. Became fifteen. Finally we began to hear the slow scuff of footsteps coming up the hill. I had to hang on to Will’s shoulder, or I would have run between the candles and peered over the hillcrest. Another minute passed, and panting breath could be heard above the footsteps, and the roll of stones. At length a dark head topped the rise. Surged into a tall body. And became Nick, grey-white with exhaustion, moving at a loping trudge between the burnt-out candles. He was looking at the burning stub of his candle and so intent on that and on his journey that he did not at first realise he had finished it. He looked bewildered when we both bellowed, “Nick!”
I looked at the empty hillcrest behind him. I could hear no more footsteps. “Nick,” I said. “What happened?”
Nick’s shoulders slumped. “Can I blow this out now?” he asked, raising his candle stump.
“Come on out by the chair first,” Will said. “That’s it. Want to sit? No? OK.” He shepherded Ni
ck quickly into the space by the bed, shooting a look at me to convey that Nick was out on his feet. “Now. What happened?” he asked very gently.
I don’t think I could have said or done anything. I was too desolated.
“We got there,” Nick said. “Maree and I did. We lost Rob. The last bit, that was. I don’t know what happened, not to Rob. Oh, and before that we met your friend, Rupert. The one Maree thinks is fabulous and Nordic. He said to tell you where he’d gone.”
Nick ran down here and stood staring at the carpet. Will said, “And?”
“We got there,” Nick repeated. Then, with a sudden access of energy, he added, “And you’ll never guess what Maree went and did! When we were at – at the – at the right place anyway – and you were supposed to ask for just one thing. I couldn’t believe it! She went and asked for her dad to be cured of his cancer!”
I couldn’t look at Will, though I know he was staring at me. “So what happened then?” I managed to say.
“What? Oh, I had to ask for her, of course,” Nick said, rather irritably. “I had to use mine up and now I’ll never be—” He shut his mouth resolutely on whatever ambition that had been and, I suspected, on the tears that went with it. “I asked just like you told us,” he said. “Every word, carefully.”
“Well done,” said Will. “Didn’t it work then?”
Nick seemed surprised. “Yes, of course it worked.”
“Where is Maree then?” I dared to ask.
Nick hunched his shoulders. “How should I know? Isn’t she coming?”
“Not that we can see,” Will said.
“Well, I don’t know. I didn’t dare look,” Nick said. “I remembered those stories – that man who went to hell to get that girl – you know – and I thought I heard her behind me, but I didn’t dare look, in case, in case…”
“That was well done too,” I said quickly. “We may even be missing a verse about it. I’m sure she’ll be along.”