Deep Secret

  “That’s it. We lost him. Now we’re in Yonder Bristolia where most of the magic users live.”

  “Yes, but I wish we weren’t in line for the suspension bridge!” I more or less moaned.

  “It’s all right. I’ve got money to get across,” Nick said.

  “But it’s the place I have bad dreams about!” I wailed. I really didn’t want to go there. My bad mood was back. It was thanks to Janine. She’d stripped the joy about passing my test off the underlying misery and, though I’d forgotten it a bit during the tour of exotic Bristolia, it was still there, as bad as ever.

  “I was hoping I’d stopped you being so gloomy,” Nick said.

  “I can’t. I’ve been crossed in love,” I said. “And there’s my dad – not to speak of the dreams.”

  I suppose it’s not surprising Nick got the wrong idea of the dreams. Clifton Suspension Bridge is notorious for suicides. “You mean you dream about jumping off?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “They’re weirder than that.”

  “Tell the dreams,” he commanded.

  So I told him, though they were something I’d never mentioned to a soul before. I almost don’t mention them to myself, apart from calling this journal Directory Thornlady just to show I know about them really. They’re too nasty. They go with a horrible, depressed, weak feeling. I’ve been having the dreams for over three years now, ever since we moved to London and Mum and Dad split up, and they make me wonder if I might be going mad. I was sure Nick would think they were mad. But there is something about driving a car that makes you confiding – like a sort of mobile analyst’s couch – and after Nick and I had shared the feeling of being followed, I felt as if we’d shared minds anyway.

  In the dreams I am always at the Bristol end of the bridge, and I go up the steep path that cuts into the bank by the footpath there and find I’m on a wide moorland by moonlight (not that I ever see the moon: I just know it’s moonlight). I walk until I come to a path. Some nights I find I can dig my heels in and refuse to take that path. Then I get punished. I get lost in the dream, wandering about in beastly marsh-like places, and wake up feeling incredibly frightened and guilty. If I give in (or can’t dig my heels in) and simply follow the path, I always come to a sort of horizon, where the sky comes right down to the moor, and there is a solitary dark bush in the middle of it. That bush is an old woman.

  Don’t ask me how. Nick asked me how. I couldn’t tell him. She isn’t made of twigs. She isn’t the sky showing through the bush. She isn’t even exactly in the bush. But in my dream I know that the bush is the same thing as a narrow-faced severe old woman who is probably a goddess. I don’t like her. She despises me. And she’s brought me here to tell me off.

  “Don’t ever expect any sort of luck or success,” she says, “until you stop this aggressive approach to life. It’s not ladylike. A lady should sit gracefully by and let others handle things.” She always says that sort of thing, but recently she’s been on about Robbie too. At first it was the immorality of living with him, and now that seems to be over she says, “It’s degrading for a lady to go pining after a man. You won’t have any luck or worth in your life until you give up university and marry a nice normal young man.”

  “And don’t tell me it’s my subconscious talking!” I said to Nick.

  “It isn’t. It’s not the way you think or talk at all. It’s not you,” he said decidedly. “I think she’s a witch.”

  “I call her Thornlady,” I confessed. Just then it dawned on me that Dad’s car was making incredibly heavy weather of the hill up beside the gorge. We were crawling. The engine was going punk, punk, punk. And then I looked in the mirror (which I’d forgotten to do while I told Nick about the dreams), I could see a whole line of cars snorting and toiling and crawling impatiently behind us. The road behind us between the hedges was full of blue fumes. “Oh God!” I said. “What’s wrong? We’re breaking down!”

  “You could try going into another gear,” Nick suggested.

  I looked down and found I was in fourth. No wonder! I slammed us down into second and we took wings. The car gave a grateful howling sound as we hurtled round the last bends and swooped along to the bridge. Nick produced a lavish handful of coins and paid the toll machine.

  “It’s an omen. You may have changed my luck,” I said as we shimmied across the gorge.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Nick answered. “We ought to break that dream. Why don’t we—”

  I knew what he was going to say. We both shouted in chorus, “Do the Witchy Dance for Luck!”

  I stopped the car as soon as we were across the bridge. I vaulted out. Nick unfolded out, and we both rushed to the pavement beside where the path went up. The Witchy Dance was something we had done often and often when we were kids – we were convinced then that it worked too – but we were both a bit out of practice. I got into the swing of it fairly quickly. Nick was self-conscious and he took longer. We were into the third flick, flick, flick of the fingers before he loosened up. After that we were both going like a train when people began honking and hooting horns at us.

  “Take no notice,” I panted. Flick, flick, flick. “Luck, luck, luck,” we chanted. “Break that dream. Luck, luck, luck!”

  The horns seemed to get louder, but I had a strong feeling the Witchy Dance was really working – Nick says he had too – so we simply went on dancing. Next thing I knew, the man in the car behind me had climbed out and marched round to the pavement in front of me.

  “Go and hold your Sabbath somewhere else!” he shouted. Oh he was angry. I looked at him. I looked at his great silver car and then back at him. He was a total prat. He had a long head with smooth, smooth hair, gold-rimmed glasses, a white strappy mac and a suit, for heaven’s sake! And instead of a tie he had one of those fancy silk cravat things. Businessman, I thought. We’ve made him half a minute late for an appointment. I took a glance at Nick to see what he thought. But Nick can be a real rat. He was busy injecting acute embarrassment into every pore of himself. He stood there and he cringed, the rat! It wasn’t me, sir! She made me do it, Officer! The woman tempted me and I did eat, Lord! I could have smacked him.

  So I fought my own battle as usual by pushing my glasses up my nose with one finger in order to point a truly dirty look at the prat.

  Unfortunately he was a tougher nut than he looked. He held his left lens up against his left eye and gave me the dirty look right back. In spades. I was about to resort to speech then, but the prat got in first. “I am Rupert Venables,” he snaps. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon to give you this.” And he fetches out a hundred quid and counts it into my hand.

  I was too gobsmacked even to get round to asking how he knew it was me. For that, blame the other motorists. There seemed to be several hundred cars lined up going both ways by then, and they were all gooping. When they saw the money, they began to cheer. I don’t think they thought the prat was paying me to move my car, either. Oh I was FURIOUS. And Nick was overwhelmed with genuine embarrassment as soon as he heard the name and saw the money, and he was no help at all. We simply got into Dad’s car and I drove us away. Rather jerkily.

  After a while I said – between my teeth – “I hope for both our sakes I never meet that prat again. Murder will be done.”

  Nick said, “But the Witchy Dance has worked.”

  That inflamed my wrath further. “What do you mean, you rat?”

  “You got a hundred pounds with no strings attached,” he pointed out.

  “They’re probably forged notes,” I said.

  “What are you going to buy with them?” Nick asked.

  “Oh don’t ask – I need almost everything you can name,” I said. I suppose I was mollified. I know I haven’t felt nearly so depressed since.

  Rupert Venables for the

  Iforion archive

  Once the various fatelines were moving the right way, I could keep them in hand without too much trouble. I took the blocks off my communication
s. Instantly the phone rang. The answering-machine flashed furiously. Two computers put up MESSAGES INCOMING and the fax machine put out paper after paper.

  “Well it’s nice to be needed,” I said to Stan.

  About half the stuff waiting was requests or enquiries from the software and games companies I work for. Two recorded calls were from Magids elsewhere in the world wanting to know why I had let the beef crisis get so much out of hand. I swore. I hadn’t realised it had. And it was too late to do anything by then. The current phone call was a girl I know in Cambridge who wanted to know why I hadn’t been seen or heard of since Christmas. I told her an old friend had died and left me a lot of unfinished business.

  “That’s right. Blame me,” growled the voice of that same old friend from behind me.

  One of the computers was full of regular e-mail. I let it wait and turned to the other. It was my channel for Magid business and wouldn’t wait. Months can pass without Magid communicating with Magid, but when they do communicate there is an urgent need-to-know.

  The first message was from my brother Will. WHAT’S HAPPENING? THULE IS SWAMPED WITH REFUGEES FROM KORYFONIC WORLDS.

  The next was from a Magid called Zinka on the other side of the Empire from Will. DID YOU KNOW KORYFONIC 10 & 12 – I.E. ERATH AND TELTH – HAVE DECLARED INDEPENDENCE AND ARE MAKING WARLIKE NOISES AT MY LOT? The third message said much the same, only about Koryfonic 9 and 7. The fourth was from my brother Simon: RUMOURS HERE THAT THE KORYFONIC EMPIRE IS BREAKING UP. IS THIS INTENDED? IF NOT, DO YOU NEED HELP? INTENDED OR NOT, IT SEEMS HARD ON THE PEOPLE THERE.

  I said to Stan, “Well? Is it intended?”

  “Probably,” he replied.

  Gloomily, I went through the faxes. Two-thirds of them were from General Dakros. Typically, he said nothing about war, or worlds seceding from the Empire. To him, this was military business and nothing to do with a Magid. The first few faxes were jubilant. He thought he was on the track of Knarros; he had found him; through Knarros he now had a line on the Babylon heirs. By the sixth fax, he had found two more people claiming to be Knarros and the number of putative heirs had trebled. After that it was exponential. Lost Emperors had poured in on him while I was otherwise engaged – hundreds of them, and several score Knarroses. The latest fax said,

  I’ve weeded it down to eight men who may possibly be Knarros.

  The Empire would appreciate your help in this.

  “What do you think I should do?” I said to Stan.

  “Lad, I’m supposed to be advising you about sponsoring a new Magid, not about this,” he answered. “What do you think?”

  “I… think…” I said slowly, trying to get at the right gut feeling on this, “that the Empire is breaking up as was intended all along – and this is why they always put the newest Magid on to it. He or she will make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes. I could have saved that poor sod Timotheo – OK, OK, Stan. It’s done. I won’t beat my breast about it any longer. But to judge from the history of this world, when a big Empire breaks up, there’s usually one or two last rulers at the head of it who are either very weak or very young, to, to…”

  “Sort of guide it down the drain?” Stan said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “So I imagine it’s my job to go and pick a Knarros – any old Knarros – to provide Koryfos with a weak ruler. Stan, this is the part of being a Magid that’s not pleasant.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’ve done some dirty things too.”

  I got through to Dakros, sighing rather, and was directed to meet him in a distant suburb of Iforion. Just arrive in the road, he said. Someone would be looking out for me.

  They were.

  I stepped out into a chilly, rubble-covered street between two rows of small houses, and something went whee past my head and whang into a low brick wall. In fact, whatever-it-was only missed me because I stumbled on the rubble as I arrived and twisted my ankle. I dived into the garden behind the low brick wall, ankle and all, and crouched there, watching the opposition retaliate. One of their queer beam-guns yammered from the next house along from my garden. A flaming bundle with arms but no legs toppled from behind a chimney across the street and plumped down somewhere out of sight. The stench of it streamed across me. I felt ill. I know this kind of thing happens all the time in my world – in most worlds – but I still felt sick, and weak, and hot round the eyes. I also wondered, with some earnestness, which side was whose.

  General Dakros settled that by coming out of the next-door house at a run. “Are you alive there, Magid?” he shouted. He looked like the Big Bear in the Goldilocks story, coming out of that small house in a great furry hooded coat which did not look like army issue.

  I managed to smile at his bearish look. I rolled on to my knees and shouted back that I was fine.

  “Sorry about that. We never get to the bottom of the sniper problem,” he said. He came and helped me scramble over the wall and hobble into the house. The air smelt horribly of soot. I thought it was from the dead sniper, until he helped me through into a back room. This street of houses was built on a hill. Through the back window was what ought to have been a fine view of the city. Now it was a panorama of drifting smoke, high buildings with black empty windows, two ruined bridges and one stately climbing cloud of fresh new grey-blue smoke with a tower burning in the midst of it. There were bright red flags of flame in the rolls of smoke. “Insurrection in the city,” Dakros explained as he put back his furry hood. He had lost weight. He looked far more tired and harrowed than when I had last seen him. “The poorer classes don’t like the way everything’s getting so expensive.” He ran both hands through his black wriggly hair, which had definitely become thinner since the Palace fell. “I can’t understand it myself,” he added. “Money just seems to be worth nothing suddenly. I’ve had to issue a list of what things are supposed to cost – bread and so on – with penalties for overcharging, but it’s made no difference. Goods just vanished overnight. Some of them have to be sold in secret or bartered, but I don’t see why at all.”

  I felt acutely sorry for him. Things like this might be intended, but Dakros was the one who had to cope with it all. “Inflation,” I said, “happens when times are unstable. The Emperor kept things stable, if only by consuming most of the valuables he could get his hands on.”

  “Then let’s get another Emperor quickly!” he said, with vehemence. “I’m sick of all these frauds, Magid. Did you know there were over a thousand of them?”

  “What have you done with them all?” I asked him.

  He was surprised I should wonder. “Executed them.”

  “Bad idea,” I said.

  They committed treason and fraud,” he said. He shrugged. “You can’t let people get away with that.”

  “True,” I admitted. “But there are alternatives. Talking of which, where are all these other people who say they’re Knarros?”

  “Oh, I’ve got them all lined up for you in the next room under guard,” he said. “I’ll have them marched in one by one and you can look them over in here. That suit you?”

  The straightforward, soldierly method, I thought. It did not surprise me that things were falling to pieces here. Still, I was glad that I was not going to have to travel about the place to interview the claimants. The chances of getting shot seemed quite high. And my ankle still hurt, and both knees, where I had hit the ground. “Wheel them in, then,” I said.

  I do not wish to dwell on those eight interviews with eight doomed men. They were all middle-aged and all looked rather imposing. You felt each one of them must have looked in the mirror at some point and thought, I look like someone the Emperor would trust. One was more or less in rags, one in the soutane of one of the travelling religions, and one seemed to be a minor noble. Two of them were school-teachers. God knows why those two had put themselves forward, unless it was looking in a mirror, as I said, and knowing they had care of the young – so why not the Emperor’s young? The other three were a grocer, a farmer and a poet. All these w
ere mad. So, I discovered after a while, was the preacher. The one in rags was a sly rogue, the noble a blatant one. Most of them looked bewildered or shifty when I asked them about the youngsters supposedly in their charge, though the noble talked glibly of “the Emperor’s five fine boys”.

  It did not take very deep Magid work to ascertain that every one of them was another fraud. And the worst of it was I could not bring myself to pretend about any one of them. I looked at Dakros’s strained face. I looked at the poet as they marched him away. I could not do this to him. Bugger the Empire. Bugger what was Intended. Dakros deserved some honesty.

  “Sorry,” I said, when the door had shut behind the poet’s escort. “None of them is Knarros. But you could do yourself and the Empire a bit of good if you put them on trial publicly. Let justice be seen to be done. Expose them. Prove the mad ones are mad. Then imprison the sane ones and put the loonies in an asylum.”

  It did no good. Dakros had not been raised to think in this way. He ran his hands through his decreasing hair again and said, “I’m sick of taking strong measures.” This did not mean he was considering what I said. It meant that he was going to take the strong measures, and he was fed up with doing it. I think the only reason he didn’t order a firing squad out into the back garden straight away was that he guessed I would find it offensive. He added, “I’m only saying this to you, you understand, because I can’t say it to anyone else. I’m sick of this whole thing. I keep wondering why I’m the one who’s been landed with it, and I want it to stop.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Is High Lady Alexandra not with you?”