A Sudden Wild Magic

1

The High Head was gloomily aware that he had made almost every soul on Arth extremely unhappy. But, he told himself, he had to do something about the wild disorder in the vibrations, and the only way, with the culprits seemingly still at large in the bowels of the citadel, was to order a massive clampdown. This was now in force. Servicemen and cadets groaned under double parades and compulsory rituals. The lower-order Brothers were required to attend mass meditations and cleansing rituals four times a day, while their seniors, when they were not on duty for these, were under orders to meditate alone in their cells. The buttery was closed, so that even the dubious consolation of passet beer was denied.

As a further precaution, the High Head went in person to inspect each Horn. This, he was not unaware, caused considerable panic. He had uncovered a stupefying number of hastily concealed irregularities. In Observer Horn, for instance, he was forced to order them to reperform all viewings made in the last six weeks.

“Regardless of the fact that we can’t!” a junior Brother told Helen in Kitchen. For some reason, everyone came and told Helen things. Her cool, accepting manner had come to be regarded as wisdom. No one knew Judy very well, and Roz was wisely keeping out of sight. So was Sandra, after the High Head inspected Calculus.

There the High Head found such chaos that he concluded High Brother Gamon was insane and demoted him to the ranks. To do him justice, the High Head did not at that stage connect any of the disorder with the women — apart from Zillah, that is. He went on to censure Maintenance for allowing Rax and seven other servicemen to sit in a storeroom breathing glue and oxygen. “And we didn’t even know they were there!” a Duty Mage told Helen. Rax and his friends had been stealing a number of foodstuffs to sell too, which caused Housekeeping to be hauled over the coals as well. Ritual Horn was then found to be skimping, cutting corners and gabbling formulae. “But if we didn’t do that, we’d never get through all the stuff he’s piling onto us!” Alexander complained to Helen. Flan was mysteriously not to be found, so her handsome young mage came to Helen like everyone else.

And while Alexander uttered these complaints, the High Head was proceeding through Records, to demote two senior mages; and to Defense, where he arraigned almost everyone for overzealousness and rigidity. Even Healing Horn did not escape, for Edward had unaccountably failed to make proper records of his healing of Judy.

Finally, having dealt out penances to nine-tenths of the population of Arth, the High Head advanced on Kitchen. Unfortunately, he arrived to find Helen surrounded by an indignant crowd from all over the citadel. He sent every man of them about his business, with further penances, and then laid a geas on Helen, banning her from entering Kitchen again. After that, he did what he had really come to do and ordered a diet of passet henceforth for every meal. No fried food, he decreed, no spices, no sauces, no roast. Meat stewed in water only, with passet, was to be eaten from now on, and bread must be kept for two days before it was eaten.

Someone told Helen that Brother Milo wept. All the other High Brothers were equally upset, for the ordering of discipline in their own Horns was traditionally theirs. This had been the custom for four hundred years, regardless of the fact that the law was on the side of the High Head. Brother Nathan declared that the High Head had been unpardonably high-handed. Brother Gamon added that the man was a soulless traditionalist without a spark of human feeling. “And without a stomach either,” snarled Brother Dewi.

“He has been, at the very least, unpardonably impolite,” stated the Horn Head of Alchemy, who was so relieved to have escaped reprimand that he could afford to be angry on behalf of the others. “We have been slighted. We are annoyed.”

It would not have cheered them to know that, when the High Head returned to his office and tried to get on with the normal business of the day, he was no happier than they were. For one thing, he had acted like a tyrant, and he hated it. For another, the vibrations continued in unabated wild fluctuations. He promised himself revenge on Zillah, not to speak of the gualdian and the centaur, when the search parties finally ran them to earth. They had been lurking down there for three days now. True, there was unfortunately plenty of food in the depths — but surely it was only a matter of time before someone tracked them down! When they did, he would find it a pleasure to make them pay for all this necessary tyranny. The whole of Arth would revile them. And meanwhile, with all this going on, all the experiments with otherworld were in almost complete abeyance. He would have Lady Marceny on his tail any minute now. He groaned at the thought.

In their own quarters, the women groaned too. “More wasting time!” Roz strode angrily up and down the bare blue room. “I’m sick of you lot sitting about like a wet week! What are all these rituals about? You realize they’re excluding us, don’t you?”

“We don’t count as mages,” Helen said dryly. She was sitting upright against the wall, twiddling her long thumbs.

This irritated Roz. Most things irritated her by then. “I count myself a perfectly good female mage,” she said. “When I think of all I’ve learnt—”

“Have you learnt a way to get home?” asked Sandra, slumped beside Helen.

“Well, no,” Roz conceded. “But that’s obviously a closely guarded—”

“I’ve told you,” Flan called from her corner. “The only way to get home is to get turned into a reptile. I saw—”

“Flan!” Helen said warningly, and sighed. Sandra was in tears again. Tears rolled down her face, across her mouth, and dripped unheeded off her chin.

“I want to go home,” Sandra said. “I didn’t mean for him to lose his post for being mad. I liked him — a lot. He’s a nice guy once you get used to—”

“Oh, do please bloody well spare me your nervous breakdowns, you two!” Roz snapped. She was not happy either. It was bad enough to have to hide in here for doing the job she had been sent to do, but she did not deserve the way the cadets were behaving. Whenever any of them saw her now, they fell into lockstep behind her. And they seemed to be whispering something like “Haw, haw, haw!” Roz refused to be paranoid about silly boys, but it was horribly depressing that there did not seem to be any real way home. And—

They all looked up as Judy came in, wandering among the veils looking obscurely nervous. Flan was galvanized, and uncurled from her corner with a bounce.

“At last! Did he know what happened to Zillah?”

Judy shook her head, and Flan curled up again.

“So where have you been?” Roz demanded. “It can’t have taken you two whole days just to make sure he didn’t know!”

“Nowhere,” said Judy. “With Edward. And wandering. Thinking. I decided in the end I’d better come and warn you. We may be in trouble when Edward decides what to do. I told him we all came from the otherworld.”

“You what?” said all four as one woman.

“Told him where we come from,” said Judy. “I was sick of pretending. Edward thinks he’ll have to tell High Horns.”

“Christ!” said Roz. “And didn’t you even have the nous to swear him to secrecy first? Honestly! What kind of a bunch of women have I got myself mixed up with? Not one of you has a scrap of patriotism. Not one of you even has a spine! Sandra goes and falls in love — in love! — with the man she’s supposed to be seducing in order to save her world. And our poor world goes out of the window at once. Flan sees a ritual and thinks Zillah’s been put through it, so Flan curls up and decides to die. Our world goes out of the window again. Helen gets turned out of the kitchen, so what does Helen do? Helen sits and twiddles her thumbs. Our world goes out of the window a third time. And then, to crown it all, little Judy goes and prattles to her Edward about exactly where we come from. World out of the window for good. Lord! Are you lot trying to be traitors? Well, I’m not. I’m a patriot. I love my world. I came here to do a job, and I want it done. Thanks to Judy, we’ve got a real crisis on. So let’s have some action, shall we?”

“Speech!” Flan murmured rudely. “What a lot of good you did!” Judy simply turned around and walked out of the room again. Sandra got up and bolted after her, sobbing.

Helen unfolded herself and advanced on Roz. “And what action do you suggest? Haven’t you noticed that we’ve all worked like stink in our own ways, and it’s all come to nothing? That’s what’s the matter!” She stalked past Roz and out through the veiling too.

Flan was still curled in her corner, so Roz turned to her. “Worked? Who’s worked? None of you except me. I’m the only one who seems to know the meaning of the word! I’ve worked. Good stern work! That’s what this fortress responds to. I can feel it responding. And it’s responding to me. Me working. Keeping our mission going single-handed. You don’t catch me moping in a corner doing nothing. You don’t—”

“Oh, shut up!” said Flan. “You’re worse than High Horns. Your stern work my left buttock! Zillah got it right. What this fortress wants is a little fun for a change!”

“I’m not staying here to be insulted,” said Roz.

“Go away then,” said Flan.

Roz marched out. The door veiled and there was quiet. But not peace, Flan thought. Maybe she was having a nervous breakdown. She couldn’t seem to get that horrible ritual out of her mind. It sapped her of all desire to do anything but curl up in a corner and listen to the pulsing of the citadel — or it could be just the pulse in her own ears. At the moment, citadel or ears, it was a sulky, sick bumping, as insistent as Roz’s voice, which seemed to be hating all these rituals, every one of them, and urging Flan to do something to give them both some peace. Flan was fairly sure the sight of Tod turning gray and oozy had sent her mad.

There was a sort of sigh, and a feeling of release, followed by multiple movement like an army breaking step to cross a bridge. Flan raised her head. Yes, there were footsteps and voices in the distance. The latest ritual was over. Good. Roz had called for action. Let’s have some action then. But better catch them before they all went to meditate or whatever.

Flan sprang up and ran. Burst out through the door veil, raced down blue corridors. Shot past mages in groups and pairs coming the other way. Plunged through the veil into the main hall of Ritual Horn. Her friends from Ritual were mostly still there, either standing about looking jaded or packing chalices away in caskets. Nearly everyone turned to greet her. Most smiled. Even Brother Nathan, far from descending on her with more blackmail, kept over the other side of the hall, where he smiled at her anxiously and rather diffidently. How nice, Flan thought. They all like me!

“Had a good ritual?” she said. There was a glum, dead silence. “And how are the vibes?” There were shrugs. Not good, evidently. “Well then,” said Flan, “how about a bit of fun to take the taste away?” The way everyone reacted, they would have liked fun, but they thought High Horns might have forbidden it along with most other things. “There’s no harm in it,” Flan said. “It’s a very simple dance. Here, let me show you.” And, quite in her old manner — or perhaps a little more feverishly — she seized the four or five who were always ready to have a go and put them in a line with their arms around one another’s waists. She put herself at the head of the line and wrapped the arms of good-looking Alexander firmly around her. “Now, just do as I do. Four bouncing steps — left-right-left-right. And right leg out. That’s it. And again, people. Let’s all do the conga — ah! Again! Let’s all do the conga—ah!” She led the line around the hall. “Come on, people. You sing too!”

They got the idea. The conga is probably the easiest dance ever learned. “Let’s all do the conga — AH!” the five shouted, capering and shooting out legs in unison. The others, Brother Nathan among them, took up the rhythm, clapping.

“Join in!” Flan shouted.

They did. It was so easy and harmless and a great relief besides. Before Flan had made one full circuit of the hall, everybody in it was rushing to seize the waist at the end of the line and join in — step and step and step and step and leg out. Their trained voices rose lustily. “Let’s all do the conga — Ah!”

Flan, capering energetically, led them out of the nearest door and up the ramp beyond. “This is what you’re supposed to do!” she panted. “Conga, people!”

Halfway up the ramp, she knew she had got it right. She was not sure quite what was right, except that she knew it was. Mages were racing down side passages and leaping onto the ramp to join the line, laughing at the absurd dance and seizing the chance to express frustrations by being harmlessly silly. The bouncing, singing line was twice as long when it left the ramp and bounced and shot its legs out into Records Horn. By this time, Flan knew it was more than that. The sullen vibrations of the citadel were changing, rising to meet the rhythm she was making. Bursts of energy came to her in glad gusts. She knew that if need be, she could conga for the next twenty-four hours.

They swept up the mages from Records and congaed on toward Calculus. There Sandra, sobbing inside a concerned crowd of mage-calculators, looked up, saw the line, and shouted, “Yes! Conga him out, man!” And the entire Horn joined in. Warm and rhythmic, they bounced and shot legs out, downward to collect the cadets next. To Sandra, with her arms wrapped around Brother Gamon and her face in the prickly blue cloth of his uniform, it was as if life suddenly became new and clean and simple. By the time the line had collected the servicemen and bounced on to sweep in Maintenance Horn and Defense, the surprising pain of love, of the conflicting loyalties Sandra felt at all times, had melted simply to rhythm and song and to Brother Gamon bouncing in front of her, as if difficulties had never been. Absurd mirth flooded her as they swept down on Alchemy Horn. The cadets and servicemen, like a lusty shot in the arm, were roaring out what they thought the words were.

“Bets and balls and bonkers — AH!”

In fact, since the line was now a quarter of a mile long, there was the usual difference of opinion as to just what the words were. Alchemy Horn was certain they were “Can’t stand it all much longer — AH!” and Crafting sang, “Wronger still and wronger — AH!” while Observer Horn, when the mages there found the capering line roaring through their midst, joined it eagerly under the impression the words were “The High Head is a plonker — AH!”

Roz stood for a minute aghast, then for another minute with her arms folded and her lip curled — it was unbelievably silly and nonserious — but, as the blue-clad capering line receded from her down the corridor, where the front of it was already jolting and singing up and around the ramps on the next level, Roz was aware she had a choice. It seemed to be handed to her by the citadel itself. For the first time she became conscious that the place did indeed have vibrations, potent and awesome, like a voice. It spoke to her. Either she could join in this unusual and crazy piece of magic and become part of it, or she must stay aside and remain aside forever. She was suddenly aware there were others refusing to join in. She sensed Brother Wilfrid for one, hiding in a cupboard full of spare uniforms, and the obdurate Horn Head of Defense, who was still single-handedly guarding Arth from nonexistent invaders. Roz could be like those, the citadel told her, or — But Roz was always one who could not abide to be out of things. She sprinted after the capering line and flung herself onto the end of it. Step and step and step and step and boot in! And yelled out her own individual words. “If you can’t beat ’em join ’em — Ah!”

On the upper level the line was snaking through dormitories and recreation halls, where it swept up any mages who happened to be there and went snaking on down to Kitchen. Some accompanied the line as outriders and spectators. There were a number of mages up there too elderly to dance, and these followed excitedly, the way people follow processions, limping hurriedly through corridors parallel with the dancers in order to intercept them as they went bouncing and yelling uproariously through the kitchens and gathered in everyone at work there.

Brother Milo fled the line, to an alcove in the corridor beyond, appalled and shaken by the fierce new vibrations the dancers brought with them. But in the alcove he found himself pressed against the angular warmth of another body. He sprang around to find it was Helen. “What are you doing here? I thought you were banned from Kitchen?”

“I am indeed,” she told him, “and if you notice, I’m not in there. Your bloody High Horns made it physically impossible for me to cross the threshold.”

“No doubt he knows best,” Brother Milo piously said.

Helen’s reply was blasphemous, but Brother Milo was saved from hearing it. The conga was upon them, and past, and still going past, and continuing to pass them, an apparently endless line of blue-clad bouncing, yelling mages, a mere body-width away in the corridor. “Hellband fall on wrong uns!” Brother Milo heard. But next second the words seemed to be “Spells are all much stronger — ah!” or were they really singing, “Helen’s food will conquer — ah!” or was it again “Blessings fall upon her — ah!” Helen, he noticed uneasily, was jogging to the time of the ditty, with her widest, coolest smile. She bent down to him to shout, “I want you to join in this!”

He shouted back, “Are you trying to seduce me again?”

“No!” she bawled. “I gave that up days ago. I know you’re a saint!”

“Naturally celibate,” he yelled reprovingly. “I told you — I keep my Oath.”

“I’m not asking you to break your damned Oath!” she roared in his face. “I’m just asking you to dance! Is that so bad? I want to — I will if you will!”

It did look fun, Brother Milo thought, wistfully watching joyous faces prancing past. And nothing in the Oath said anything about dancing. The end of the line was coming past now. He could hear himself speak when he protested, “I don’t know the words!”

“Nobody ever does,” said Helen. “Make some up.”

And here came the end of the line, the two kitchen cadets, out of step and shooting the wrong leg out and roaring, “Cesspits are for honkers — Ah!”

“Oh, all right,” said Brother Milo. He seized the waist of the hinder cadet and joined in, lustily singing, “Decline and fall and conquer — Ah!” He felt Helen seize his waist, but there really was no harm in it. “And conquer — Ah!” they both bellowed, dancing toward the main ramp. Some latecomer joined in behind Helen. As soon as she felt her waist grasped, it was clear to her that Brother Milo had given in to more than dancing. He would break his Oath with her as soon as they stopped. She felt as much sadness as triumph — which was ridiculous, since this was one of the things she was here for, for God’s sake! “Decline and fall and conquer — Ah!” She resolved that he should enjoy it tremendously. It seemed the least she could do.

Halfway up the main ramp, bouncing tirelessly at the head of the line, Flan felt as if she were in a dervishlike trance by then. It was wonderful. Almost every mage in Arth was coiling up the main ramp behind her toward Healing Horn, some upside down, some sideways, each singing for all he was worth, and the whole fortress vibrating with it. She was dimly aware that the rhythms were fiercer. The line of heads apparently jogging above her as they came up after her were singing something different now. Flan changed her own song to match the change. “I came I saw I conquered—Ah!” Flan sang, too loud in her own ears to hear that the mages coiling up the ramp were in fact singing, “Let’s pull the High Head’s legs off — Ah! Let’s finish the old bastard—Ah!” No one knew where this began, but once begun, it overtook and replaced even the servicemen’s new words, which were very dirty indeed. “LET’S KILL THAT BROTHER LAWRENCE!” they roared, and pounded upward to do it.

Edward looked up from Judy’s face. The citadel was vibrating very oddly indeed — joyfully, fiercely — tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-tum-TAH, in a way he had never known it to do before. Listening, he could hear a huge, rhythmic roar, from the throats of many people.

“What is it?” said Judy. “It’s like a football crowd.”

It was nothing Edward had heard before, a strange, uplifting, and decidedly threatening sound. He went and took a look out of the doorway. Beyond the veiling, the words were gigantic and unmistakable.

“Wait here a moment,” Edward said to Judy. He wasted no time in efforts to project to a mirror: he ran, ran in huge, long-legged strides, downward and along a corridor that gave him, every so often, arched glimpses of the roaring blue line snaking up the main ramp. The citadel pounded around him like a drum. He threw himself through the veiling of the High Head’s outer office, bursting between the two elderly mage-clerks there who had been timidly peering out to see what the noise was, and dived into the sanctum itself. It was, as usual, sunny, quiet, and serene. In here there was no hint of the beat or the roar.

The High Head looked up with placid annoyance. “Edward — I was going to send for you to explain these reports—”

“No time for that now, Lawrence!” Edward gasped. “You’ve got to get out of here! Those women are all witches from otherworld. They’ve managed to harness the vibrations against you. Every mage in the place is on the way up here roaring for your blood!”

The High Head found it impossible to grasp the enormity of what Edward was suddenly telling him. If it had not been Edward, he would have dismissed it as a joke. “But the vibrations are normal!” he said. “For the first time for—”

“They’ve got the citadel on their side,” Edward said impatiently. “You have to believe—”

“The citadel’s not a conscious entity,” the High Head interrupted. “Otherworld? Are you sure? How did they change their shapes?”

The vibrations were suddenly with them. The room shook to the enormous rhythm, rackingly. The blocks of the walls ground together, jolting in time to it, filling the room with regular clouds of fine blue dust. The High Head stood up and stared slowly around.

“It is conscious?”

“Yes, and they didn’t change shape — they’re as human as we are!” Edward gabbled. “Go now! You can just get to the secret way from your back ramp, if you go now!”

The singing became audible, huge and throaty, as if the stones of Arth themselves were chanting. The High Head dithered toward his inner door, still incredulous. “Leave everything? If I were to talk calmingly to—”

“They’d tear you apart!” Edward said, pushing him. “Go! Run!”

The High Head looked yearningly toward his mitre and sword-wand on their stand beside his desk; but the chanting was now so near that he could feel the words even through the grinding of the stones. “What about you?” he said, coughing in the blue dust. “That’s murder on its way — I can feel—”

Edward knew with fatalistic certainty that he was now cut off from Healing Horn. “Never mind me. I’m not High Head. Run!”

To his relief, the High Head wasted no further time and dived away through his inner door. Edward, coughing and resigned, ducked his way out into the clearer air of the outer office, where the roaring was louder yet, and joined the two clerks at the veiling. Given luck, the avenging mages would assume he was simply kicking his heels here, waiting to see the High Head. But they would be furious to find the High Head fled, and they all knew Edward was the man’s one friend.

That man, friendless now, was speeding giddily down a steep blue stair, with its walls beating the murderous rhythm around him. Ramp was a courtesy title: there had never chanced to be a centaur High Head, and therefore no need to adapt the secret way to hooves. Stairs made unfamiliar going. He knew he dared not waste time stumbling. Every Horn Head was given the secret of Arth’s peculiar umbilical connection to its parent universe when he assumed office. With it, in case of emergencies that had never yet arisen, they were given the Ritual of Egress. The High Head saw he dared not assume that the chanting crowd baying for his blood contained no Horn Heads. He had angered them all too much. Therefore he galloped, wondering if his knees would hold out, wondering just how long it would be before some Horn Head discovered the hidden archway in his sleeping quarters and led the baying multitude down after him.

He had just reached the point where the stairway turned to ramp as it was joined by secret ways from other Horns when he knew that they were after him. The steady vibrations broke up. Though the joyful, idiotic rhythm of the conga kept on beneath the rest, there were other rhythms above it, angry and chaotic at first, then steady and trochaic — a sort of yammering double beat that reminded the High Head hideously of some Lady’s hounds in Leathe when she had a manhunt on. It filled him with fears from childhood he had hoped never to feel again. He swung into the ramp and sprinted, thankful it was all downward, blessing the memory of the founder-mage who had decreed regular exercise for every mage in Arth, and overwhelmed with humiliation. That he should be the High Head around whom Arth broke up! So shaming. He was even more shamed to think he had been afraid of the wrong group of women. Give me Lady Marceny any day! I’d trade her for that Roz and that Helen! he thought, to the regular slamming of his feet. How many Oaths broken? Edward’s for one. With whichever woman it was who had contemptuously told Edward the truth. The bitches had got inside and rotted Arth from the core. What did it matter then who knew?

He swung into another ramp that spiraled down among the reservoirs. The mages were closing. They must have sent the younger ones after him. They were too many for him, even with his superior magecraft, and with the vibrations all on their side—

His feet skidded, and he only just saved himself on the wall. The ramp was awash with running water. Here was a further horror. What those women had done to the vibrations had cracked a reservoir. A crack, with that weight of water behind it, only took bare moments to become a large split. Shortly a wall of water would be rolling down this ramp on his heels. The terror of it was such that the High Head spared effort from running to levitate. He heaved himself up an inch or so and sped on. Goddess, the double effort was tiring! And on the next ramp down, his raised feet were splashing, sending up great gouts of spray. He was forced to send himself up another foot and run crouching through the air under the lowered ceiling. He could feel — hear! — the rumble of escaped water following him now. He cringed against the ceiling and tried to put on a spurt, scrambling like a crab. Down and around. Down in front, the water was dimly banking, dammed by the secret portal, banking higher every scrambling step he took. The following water was close to thunder. Gabbling the Rite of Egress, he dived, praying for safety.

2

Gladys had discovered the centaur’s name was Hugon, but their relationship was still far from cordial. Nor was he comfortable to ride. She reckoned that if he had been a real horse, he would have been dogmeat years ago. They were jolting across apparently interminable wide fields. Every time she spoke to him, she bit her tongue, but politeness kept her trying.

“How far — ouch—is it to the king?”

“Four days,” he said. “I don’t intend to go on through the nights.”

“Four days!” The time scheme the various Great Ones had laid on her had not allowed for that.

“What did you expect?” Hugon asked jeeringly. “Even the train takes nearly a day.”

What I am, Gladys mused, is insular. I keep thinking this country’s only about the size of Britain, even though I can feel it around me, much bigger than that.

The size of Europe with half Asia attached, Jimbo informed her.

So big? “Train?” Gladys asked aloud. “You did say train?”

“Sure. Things that go chuff-chuff,” said Hugon pityingly. He added with a surly trace of pride, “That was one of the ideas the Brotherhood of Arth handed down here — before I was born, that was.”

“Then,” said Gladys, “I think — ouch — train would be quicker. Why didn’t you mention it before?”

“Because,” Hugon snarled, “I’d have to pay, wouldn’t I? Or do you have money?”

Gladys fingered her handbag. There was only a handful of change in there. Naturally it would not look like this country’s money — though she was strongly tempted to put an illusion on the tea bags and tell him it was her train fare. But to do that, she needed to know what his money looked like. “No,” she said regretfully, “but I’m — ouch — the king would pay you back.”

“That stingy sod?” said Hugon. “Forget it.”

They argued. Gladys persuaded. Bit her tongue. Gave up. Was on the point of deciding simply to put a compulsion on this obstinate creature when he said grumpily, “All right. Who else can you get money off if the king won’t pay me?”

Easy. “Tod,” Gladys said thankfully. “The young man who was with me. Roderick Something. He told me he was heir to the Fiveir of Frinjen. That do? It sounds wealthy to me.”

“Garn!” said the centaur. “That makes him Duke of Haurbath and the gods know what-all. And he’d have to have birthright magic. He show you any?”

“Plenty,” snapped Gladys.

That seemed to work the trick. Hugon grudgingly changed direction and began to fumble defensively with the pouch slung from a belt across his shoulder. “I may not have enough,” he said, “for both of us.”

“You can put me on the train, then, and go back to whatever you were doing,” Gladys pointed out.

“Not likely,” he said. “I stick to you until someone pays me.”

Gladys sighed, bit her tongue again, and listened to her beads rattle with the uneven rhythm of his pace.

They had been going for about five minutes in the new direction when they were suddenly in a strong shower of rain. Pelting water obscured the featureless fields all around them. Jimbo whimpered. Hugon’s somewhat greasy hair was wet through in seconds. Gladys pulled her pink shawl around herself and Jimbo. The centaur slowed, trotted, walked, stopped.

“I don’t like this,” he said. As Gladys was about to agree and urge him on, he added, “I’ve never known it rain out of blue sky before. Those gods don’t want us to take the train. I know.”

Gladys looked up and found that beyond the fierce slant of rain, the sky was indeed bright, cloudless blue.

“Raining fish too,” Hugon said disgustedly. “Alive. What in hellband is this?”

Gladys bent forward and stared at the large trout flopping and twisting in the grass beyond Hugon’s gnarled front hooves. “Does this happen ofte—?”

She and Jimbo and Hugon were all hit simultaneously by something heavy traveling at speed. There was a good deal of noise, mostly from Hugon and Jimbo, but among the shouting and squealing, Gladys heard another voice crying out too. She let her natural defensive magic take over and landed on her feet in the wet grass. When her confusion had passed, she realized that the person who had hit them must also have natural magic — well, he would have, she realized — because he was also standing unhurt, towering over her. He was tall and well set up, though not young, wearing a blue uniform of some kind. Across his wet forehead and streaming hair she saw a habitual dent, as if he usually wore a headdress of some kind. But how well she knew the features beneath it!

“Leonard!” she exclaimed. “Oh no, you can’t be!”

The High Head stared at this dumpy elderly female, at the damp and drooping feather on its head, at its beaded gown the color of Arth, and particularly at its great white furry feet. The edge of his vision took in an irate centaur with an ether monkey crouching beneath its belly, and the shower of water receding across the meadows. “My name is Lawrence, madam,” he said, and wondered why she was staring at him as if he were a ghost. Probably because he had seemingly fallen out of the sky. He sensed she had power. Therefore he asked politely, “You are a Goddess Priestess, perhaps?”

“In a way.” Gladys still had her face tipped up, staring. “I’m from the place they call otherworld here.” The eyes of the High Head sped involuntarily to her white, woolly feet. “No, they are not my feet!” she told him crossly. “I’m as human as you are! And you’re the very image of Len — my husband. But Len died years ago now, so I reckon you’re just his thingummy — analogue — aren’t you? Where did you spring from?”

“Arth,” said the High Head with grim dignity. “And I take it you are another piece of the otherworld conspiracy?”

The girls, Gladys thought, have managed to pull something off, bless their hearts! “In a way,” she admitted. “But there’s no good in glowering like that at me, my friend. Len never could get the better of me, and I’ve learnt a lot since then. So who are you? Your gods and Powers set me to meet someone on my way, and you must be the someone.”

He shot her a grimmer look still and turned to the centaur. “Centaur, I’m the High Head of Arth, and I need to get to the king urgently.”

“Oh no, not another one!” Hugon growled. “Have you any money?”

“Well, naturally, not at the moment—”

“Then go whistle!” said Hugon. “I’m paying her train fare because the damn gods will have my guts if I don’t, but I’ll be raped if I pay for you too!”

The High Head, to his exasperation, was forced to look pleadingly at Gladys.

“Yes, I’ve got to get to the king too,” she said. “That’s gods for you. I’ve never known them be entirely practical. Hugon—”

“No,” said Hugon.

Surly brute, thought the High Head. He could argue all day and the centaur would probably still refuse. And he knew he had to get to the king and have him raise his royal power on behalf of Arth today. Given the time difference between here and Arth, those alien witches would have pulled the citadel apart by tomorrow. The High Head dithered for a moment, contemplating knocking the centaur out, putting the woman under stasis — which might not work, because she need not have been bluffing that she could best him — and running for the nearest train with the centaur’s pouch. But there was that ether monkey crouching between the centaur’s hooves. Its round black eyes were fixed on his, knowingly.

He was not sure whose side it was on, except that it was probably not on his. No one in Arth or the Pentarchy had ever been able to fathom the powers of an ether monkey, but they were generally suspected to be considerable. He saw he would have to stoop to negotiation.

“Madam,” he said, selecting Gladys as marginally the most rational of the three, “since it seems we have the same destination and somewhat the same problem, would you agree to some measure of cooperation?”

“I might,” she said. “It depends what you want.”

“There is,” said the High Head, “an alternative means of reaching the king which, being from another world, it is possible you do not know. I would be willing to instruct you in this method, provided you would agree to perform no hostile act until we stand before the king. I would, of course, agree to the same truce on my part.”

“Suits me,” Gladys replied readily, “though I don’t see why you should be on about hostile acts. I bear you no malice, Mr Lawrence. I need to see your king about both our worlds, as it happens.”

“Then you agree?” he said.

“I do.”

“In that case,” said the High Head, “perhaps this good centaur could guide us to the nearest grove of the Goddess?” He turned to the centaur in his most majestic manner, which hid both hope and apprehension: hope because it was always possible the centaur would show a little belated patriotism and offer him the train fare; apprehension because Hugon might realize what he was up to and give him away.

The centaur, however, merely looked relieved at not having to spend his money. “If you want,” he said. “The nearest grove’s a good mile over that way. But you’ll have to walk it.”

“I’ll walk too,” Gladys said. “I need to talk to you,” she explained to the High Head. Besides, she was tired of biting her tongue.

“I fail to see what we have to talk about,” the High Head said haughtily as they set off toward a gate in a distant hedge, with Hugon jogging ahead and the ether monkey silently scuttling behind.

“Oh, come on!” Gladys said. “You’re not stupid! But I can see you’ve had a shock, dropping out of the sky like that, and you may not have taken in what I said. You did hear me mention your gods and Powers, did you?”

“Of course,” said the High Head. “People tend to mention the gods when they wish to persuade someone that their argument is important.”

“Ah,” said Gladys. “Then you’ve never seen them?”

“It is a very rare privilege which I confess I have not had,” he told her stiffly.

“Asphorael?” she asked.

“Not for years.” He felt irritable. He had a feeling he was failing some kind of test. “Madam, you must remember I have been on Arth for many years, and Arth is not this universe. Asphorael does not manifest on Arth. But in my youth my tutor did once or twice cause him to appear mistily before us.”

“What does he look like?” Gladys asked sharply.

“As always — brightly colored and somewhat anxious,” said the High Head. “I fail to see—”

“And the Great Centaur?” Gladys pursued.

He looked down at her in astonishment. “I am not sure he has ever been seen.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “I don’t see my lot that often in my own world. I always think we may be too used to them to notice them. Can you do me a favor and make an effort to see the Great Centaur now?”

He stood still and stared at her. “My good female, that would take a daylong ritual even to—”

“No it won’t,” she insisted. “Not when he needs to talk to you. Go on. Go for it. Jimbo will help you.”

He glanced at the ether monkey. So it was with her. He would do well to remember that. Meanwhile he supposed he had better humor the woman. He braced his feet and began to summon the threads of the Wheel. A little way off, Hugon had reached the gate and was holding it open for them, pawing with impatience. The High Head sympathized. He was quivering with shock and desperate to reach the king — and now he thought about it, bruised all over — and yet here he was instead somehow at the beck and call of a fat little — little dame covered with beads like a savage. And Edward had said the folk of otherworld were one hundred percent human! If Edward had met Gladys, he might have doubted that.

Gladys watched the strange gestures he made and tried not to shake her head. He was working beside the lines of force instead of along them, and on a level she would never have chosen. But then, Len had always done things his own peculiar way too, she thought affectionately, and Len nearly always got results. This one was just the same. His gestures — with some extra manipulation from Jimbo — had caused a troubling in the air above their heads. Gladys sighed. She was only able to see white filigree whorls. That reminded her of Len too. But it was clear that the High Head, for a few instants, saw. He whirled around on her, his face pulled into a grimace of awe and anger.

“What is this? What have you done? The Great One is dying! What has otherworld done to us?”

“Nothing. It’s not our doing. But come along and I’ll try to explain.” Sadly and sedately, Gladys went through the gate and turned the way Hugon pointed up the rutty road beyond. The High Head hurried after. Hugon banged the gate shut and strode ahead again.

“You have a great deal to explain, woman!” the High Head panted, catching up with Gladys in the cloud of dust Hugon raised. “The Great One — the Pentarchy — is drowning in poison from your world! And you say it’s not your fault!”

“I didn’t say that,” Gladys said. “I do blame myself. If I’d known, I’d have done something earlier. I just hope it’s not too late now we do know. The trouble is, it’s been going on for centuries now, ever since those magicians up in that pocket universe of yours — Arth, do you call it? — spotted that my world had a lot of ideas theirs didn’t have. I expect at first they just took a look, then copied what they saw. But then they got the notion of making us get ideas for them. If they made us uncomfortable, or worked us around into having a war, or needing a new way to get about, then we set to and invented things to help us out. And they took the inventions and the ideas and sent them down here for people to use here. I reckon they’ve had everything from steam trains to penicillin and magic, for years and years now. No doubt they justified it by telling themselves that otherworld people weren’t really human.”

Heat flooded the face of the High Head. “This is certainly true,” he said. “That is — we were accustomed to rely on otherworld to initiate methods of supplying the needs of the Pentarchy. But I assure you that the whole matter was studied and the experiments most carefully controlled. It was understood from the outset that what we took from your universe must be balanced by something from ours. I was always particularly careful to do this. It was my custom to plant men from Arth in otherworld, whose real physical presence—”

“So I gather,” Gladys said dryly. “And they acted as spies for you. And they sent ideas back. Didn’t any of you think? It’s the ideas that do the damage. Magic is mostly ideas — they’re the strongest thing there is! And you took ideas, a lot of them magical ideas — so many, they fair poured into your world — and you never once gave a single idea back. Now you wonder why your seas are rising and your lands are getting poisoned!”

“This is one idea we certainly put back,” the High Head retorted. “I personally supervised a scheme to make the same situation arise in your world.”

“So that you could learn — you thought—from something that isn’t the same and doesn’t have the same causes,” Gladys said. “What you did to my world was physical, and it’s not going to help you, whatever we do. One idea takes the-gods-know how many physical tons to balance it—”

She broke off and thought, with her face wrinkled gloomily. “Oh, Mother!” To the High Head, it sounded like a prayer. “Oh Mother! If none of you had that idea before, then I’ve just fed this world another dose of poison. Let’s hope someone did.”

“I—” the High Head began to say, and then stopped. He did not believe a word of this. The whole physically based teaching of Arth was behind him, not her. And Arth worked. Or it had, he thought angrily, until six alien witches arrived in a rogue capsule. “I take it, madam, that you had some hand in the recent invasion of Arth.”

“Well, we had to do something,” Gladys said. “Did you expect us just to sit there while you played games with our climate?”

And she blandly admits it! the High Head thought. I rest my case! His anger grew, but he centered himself and controlled it. Meanwhile Hugon turned off into another lane, this one without hedges. The High Head saw stretching ahead of him the familiar straight causeway that led to a Goddess grove. The grove itself, a small, gracefully rustling clump of birches, was a bare hundred yards off. What a glad sight, he thought — a first real touch of home! Soon he would be rid of this creature. He looked at it, trudging along with its extraordinary woolly feet stained with grass and mud and its beads clacking, and permitted himself a thought as to where he would send it. Somewhere in north Trenjen where the white bears roamed. It would fit in there. And the ether monkey could go with it.

They reached the small clump of trees in silence. Hugon backed aside as they came up. “I’m not going in there,” he announced. “I’ve had my fill of gods.”

“That’s all right, dear,” Gladys said. “They only used you because you were the nearest one. I expect they were rather annoyed that you were the best they could do.”

The centaur glowered at her.

“Thank you anyway,” she said.

He grunted. Dust spurted and his hooves drummed as he made off back along the causeway.

“Well, that’s that,” Gladys said. “I hope your other way to get to the king really works, because the gods are going to throw fits if it doesn’t.”

The High Head strode among the trees. “It’s quite simple,” he explained. “The Goddess permits travel between any of her groves, and the king maintains a Royal Grove outside Ludlin. It does, however, take the power of at least two adepts to move from grove to grove.”

“Ah,” Gladys said to Jimbo as she gathered him into her arms, “I knew he needed us for something.”

Within the trees, a spring dripped into a mossy stone bowl.

“That’s pretty,” Gladys murmured. “Peaceful. Nothing fancy.”

Primitive place, the High Head thought. Bowl cracked and full of moss. “I’m going to put into your head my memory of the Royal Grove,” he said, “and you must will us there. Is that something you can do?”

“I should hope!” said Gladys.

The High Head smiled and envisaged in professional detail the Royal Grove, such a contrast to this one, with its beautifully tended turf, marble bowl and statue, and its noble trees. Gladys took it at once and held it steady. In some ways, he thought, the creature would be a pleasure to work with. He smiled again and willed her sharply to a frosty grove in the north.

To Gladys, it seemed that the quiet little grove tipped about in a fuzzy turmoil. No matter. Working with Len had sometimes been like this too. She clutched Jimbo and held her will steady. Jimbo chittered and, almost certainly, put his contribution in. After a moment, everything settled down as it should. Gladys gazed around with pleasure at the large and beautifully tended grove. The trees tall and healthy, she noted, and that statue of the Goddess as Mother was truly lovely. It gave Her quite a look of Amanda’s sister Zillah. And where was that girl?

Gladys wondered worriedly. She just had to hope Tod had found her.

“I see all this has to be royal,” she remarked to the High Head.

He whirled around irately. She saw, with sadness, that he had meant to get rid of her. “There’s no need,” she told him. “I really could get quite fond of you if you’d let me. After all, I married you once.”

The dark blood of fury suffused the High Head’s face. He glared. Perhaps it was lucky that the Grove Guard arrived then. They advanced precisely from all sides, twenty or so men and one or two tall women in red and gold livery. Strong-eyed they all were, Gladys saw. A lot of power among them. The man — captain? — who came up to the High Head looked at least as much of an adept as he did.

“Your names, and your business in the Royal Grove,” this man said coldly.

“I am the High Head of Arth, and I need to see the king urgently,” the High Head told him. “There is a crisis in Arth.”

The captain did not seem precisely impressed. “And I’m Gladys, dear,” Gladys said. “And this is Jimbo. I’m from otherworld, and he’s from — well, let’s just say down below — but he’s been with me for years, almost ever since my poor husband died. We have to see the king too. Your gods want us to.”

As she had expected, they were a good deal more interested in her, and very impressed indeed by Jimbo. But it took nearly twenty minutes of explaining and some arguing, during which time Gladys was fairly sure a number of hidden tests were performed, before the captain consented to let them set foot outside the grove.

“It’s by no means certain the king will grant you an audience,” he said. “I’ll send you to the palace, but my responsibility stops there.”

3

Outside the grove was a driveway through more well-tended turf, leading down to a tree-bordered road where a large car was waiting for them. It was, Gladys thought, settling gladly into it, newer and far more comfortable than her faithful taxi, though its appearance was that of a car fifty years older. She thought she would enjoy the drive.

The High Head was by now seething for various new reasons. “These gualdians!” he said, flinging himself in beside her. “Think they own the entire Pentarchy! They look down their noses at me — the whole squad did — because I’m only a half-breed gualdian!”

“No, that thought came from you,” Gladys told him. “But from the way they went on, I got an idea that Arth may not be too popular here. Is that right?”

The High Head remembered that consignment of servicemen — all those delinquents, one peculiar gualdian, and that sickly centaur. “That could be so,” he admitted gloomily. “I fear the king indicated as much a little while back. How did you guess?”

“I keep my eyes open,” Gladys said.

The car sped upward into the town piled on a hill beside a river. The style of the houses was no style Gladys knew — narrow and fairy-tale or thick and low, with great doors — but, she thought, you did not have to know a style to like it. Steep-pitched roofs, blue or red, a chunky bridge and a spidery one, towers like mad Chinese Gothic shooting up among the houses, all of it rising to the grayish towered building at the top. “What a lovely city!”

“It’s not changed much,” said the High Head, “but they’ve put up far too many centaur dwellings since I was last here. It’s quite spoilt the East Quarter.”

“And that tower?”

“Some newfangled factory.”

All his comments were similarly depressing. Gladys knew he was upset, but he began to annoy her. It seemed to her that she had done all she could to show him that they had a common cause, and he first tried to lose her and now snubbed her every time she opened her mouth. The car hummed slowly through a crowded square where stalls were set out. Most were piled with fruit, but Gladys saw meat, cheese, and clothing, and one stall full of animals.

“Oh, I love markets! What were those animals?”

“I didn’t see,” said the High Head repressively.

As the car started to wind its way up the hill beyond the market, Gladys lost patience. “You’ve spent too many years in that Arth place of yours,” she told him. “It’s turned you into some kind of gloomy prig. Relax, can’t you! Len could laugh at least!”

“I am not Len!” the High Head snapped.

“Yes you are,” said Gladys. “You’re Len in this world, and I’m glad it was the other one I knew. I’d never have married him if he’d been like you.”

Though the High Head did not deign to make the obvious reply, anger suffused his face nearly purple. Three worlds were conspiring against him to wound him! Three worlds were trying to make him both insignificant and ridiculous! When the car gently stopped, hood pointing into a large archway leading to the white-gray palace that crowned Ludlin, and its way was barred by a line of young gentlemen centaurs refusing to let the car go further, he could have screamed. A glance at the driver — another gualdian — showed him that the man was simply going to sit looking smugly impassive and let this happen. The High Head tore open the car door and advanced on the centaurs.

“I’m the High Head of Arth. Let me in to see the king at once!”

They stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder, wearing the same livery as the Grove Guard, and looked at him down their straight, somewhat horselike noses. “Sorry, sir,” said the one in the middle. “We’ve had no orders about anyone of your description.”

Though these guardsmen resembled Hugon only as a knife resembles a lump of ore, the High Head felt that the whole centaur race was out to thwart him too. He raved at them. He threatened them. He swore. The driver of the car opened his window to hear. An interested crowd gathered. Gladys climbed out of the vehicle, with Jimbo scuttling after her, and went to speak to the driver.

“What do we do to make them let us in?”

He shrugged. “Not much. Not if they’ve had no orders.”

Instead of shaking him, as she was very tempted to do, Gladys looked around her. The archway, and the line of centaurs too, were imbued with power. She was not sure of the source of it, but she could feel it was too strong for both her and the High Head to break, even if she could persuade the man to work with her, which she doubted she could. He was in too much of a state. Such power was very surprising, but there must be a way to get in. Someone must know how. She turned and advanced on the crowd of spectators.

They had obviously never seen anything like her before. They all — centaurs, humans, and one or two oddities she couldn’t place — backed swiftly away from her, looking alarmed, except for one of their number. This one, a little clerklike man in spectacles, with a string bag full of oranges, had obviously stopped to stare on his way back to work from the market, and seemed too bemused to move. Since he looked harmless and bewildered and was nearest, Gladys took hold of his arm.

“Sorry to bother you, dear, but do you happen to know how a person gets in to see the king? I wouldn’t ask, only it’s really important, you see.”

The little man’s bewilderment increased. “I was,” he said, “under the impression I was invisible.”

A nutter, Gladys thought. Just my luck! “No dear, I’m afraid you’re not. Auntie Gladys can see you quite clearly. Sorry to have bothered you.” She let go his arm and was turning away when she realized that everything around her had become strangely quiet. The crowd and the line of centaurs were staring. The driver was leaning out of his window, frankly gaping. Beyond that, the High Head suddenly looked like a frantic statue. She turned slowly back to the insane little man and found him smiling apologetically.

“Truly,” he said. “I like to slip away to the market from time to time. I have a habit — stupid, you may say — of liking to choose my own fruit. And usually nobody knows, because it is a fact that, when I will it, only those who also have royal blood can see me.”

“Only those — then you’re — but I’m not—” Gladys managed to say.

“No. This puzzles me,” agreed the little man. “You saw me, and you are not, as far as I know, one of my relatives. I’m sure I would have known if you were. You are — if I may say so — rather memorable.”

“I’m from otherworld,” said Gladys. “Do I call you Your Majesty?”

“A problem,” he said. “If you are from otherworld, there is no conceivable way I can be your king — but since I take it you need to see me and I am beginning to gather that the person with you who seems so angry must be High Head of Arth, I conclude there is something urgent afoot. I think we should all three go to my office.”

Five minutes later, still decidedly stunned, Gladys found herself with the king and the High Head in a plain paneled room in the palace. There was a desk under the window as plain as the room. The only personal things in it were a multitude of potted plants — everything from a tropical fern to a small rosebush — but watching the king first empty his string bag of oranges into a bowl on the table and then put a finger to the earth of the nearest plants to see if they had enough water, Gladys had no doubt that this was the king’s own private place. Having done this, His Majesty Rudolph IX, King of Trenjen, Frinjen, and Corriarden, Protector of Leathe and Overlord of the Fiveir of the Orthe, took off his clerkly spectacles and cleaned them with a handkerchief.

The handkerchief, Gladys recollected, had been invented by Richard II of England. She was not sure about spectacles. “Were those glasses one of the ideas that came down from Arth, Majesty?”

He put them on again and gazed through them at her with round, magnified eyes. “I believe so — several centuries back. Why? Is that a bad thing?” She nodded gloomily. “Then sit down,” he said, waving to the group of plain, cloth-covered chairs by the fern in the hearth, “and tell me about it. Shall we start with you, Magus Lawrence?”

The High Head, now very pale and harrowed, held on to the back of a chair and stood there stiffly. “Your Majesty, what I have to say is very serious and for your ears only.”

“I’m sure,” said the king. “But my sense is that what the two of you wish to say is closely connected. And though I feel hostility from you toward this lady, I get no sense of danger from the lady herself. So please sit and proceed, Brother Lawrence.”

Irritably, the High Head obeyed. While he talked, Gladys sat with Jimbo crouched against her and could have cheered at what had happened in Arth. Bless those dear girls! She was delighted, even though she could guess, from the way her leg was quaking with Jimbo’s laughter, that harnessing the vibrations in that way had not been entirely intentional. But that young Flan always had her instincts in the right place. Maureen’s motives, she had always suspected, had not been quite pure in choosing Flan, but it had turned out to be ideal all the same. The king, she was interested to see, did not seem too worried by any of what the High Head was telling him. He looked grave, he nodded, but he was in no way alarmed or scandalized.

“Thank you, Magus,” he said when the High Head was done. “I sympathize with your indignation and shock, naturally, but I must tell you that I have felt for some years now that Arth was in need of reform. You must have realized the way I felt from the servicemen I sent you last spring.”

“The louts,” the High Head said somberly. “Your Majesty—”

“The majority were indeed louts,” the king agreed. “We had to make up the numbers in some way, and neither I nor my advisers wished to waste any more promising young magecrafters on Arth. But the centaur and the gualdian were hand-picked by me, personally. Both are throwbacks to earlier times and so possess a large degree of wild magic. My hope was that this type of power would act to disturb the vibrations of Arth — which I suspect that it did — but I took care to balance them, in case of disaster, with a Fiveir heir with a trained birthright. And had these three had no effect, my next step would have been to go to Arth myself and force reforms upon you. I wasn’t, of course, reckoning on direct action from otherworld. By the way—” the king put his hands to the sides of his glasses and focused an apparently anxious stare upon the High Head’s harrowed face “— didn’t young Roderick Gordano play any part in all this? I don’t recollect your mentioning him, Magus.”

“Your Majesty,” the High Head said, “I have done nothing to deserve this — this high-handed one-sided action. I had no idea!” His voice cracked.

The king took advantage of the cracking to persist, musingly, “Though you tell me that young Philo and the centaur unaccountably took to the deeps of the citadel with the otherworld young woman and her child, you have not clearly indicated any reason for this.”

The High Head rallied. “I inherited a tradition,” he said chokingly. “I have been doing my best to continue it, Your Majesty. I—I behaved throughout as kindly and humanely as that tradition laid down. Tradition told me it was my duty to take in a party of women in distress. I did nothing wrong. I welcomed them, I tried to find out how to get them home. Meanwhile I warned them of our Oath and its connection with the vibrations — and my reward is that Arth and its values are now in ruins. How was I to know they were from otherworld? Tradition told me that the inhabitants of otherworld were not human!”

His distress was real. Gladys pitied him, even though she knew he was using it to bluster over the facts. The king thought so too. His hands continued to focus his glasses on the High Head. “Magus, I do not doubt you are a good man, though I could wish you were not so much inclined to the traditional. A little more real research into otherworld, a little questioning of tradition, might have helped. Now, if you recall, I asked you about Roderick Gordano.”

The High Head appeared to pull himself together. “So you did, Your Majesty. My apologies. I am in a state of shock. I suppose the young man was one of the dancers roaring for my blood in Arth just now.”

Gladys did not need the nudge Jimbo gave her. “Lawrence!” she said. “That is a whopper! You know it is. You sent Tod off to be a spy in my world. I know, because I met him on his way back here. No real coincidence, Majesty,” she told the king. “There’s only one way through — looks as if someone keeps it open — and he missed it slightly. So he got stuck, and I happened on him and put him right. He told me all what had happened to him on the way.”

The king looked at the High Head. “Magus?”

“He was caught,” said the High Head, with dignity, since he was caught himself, “making love to the young woman, Zillah. He deserved punishment. My practice is to send all such offenders to otherworld.”

“Condemned,” said the king pleasantly, “out of your own mouth, Magus. Transposing a serviceman anywhere except back to the Pentarchy is illegal, as I am sure you know. I am afraid you have given me my official excuse to remove you from your office. But I’d have had to remove you anyway. You see, it was not only Arth’s extreme traditionalism which was disturbing me. Leathe seemed to have got its claws into you—”

“I swear that is not the case!” the High Head protested. “Last time the Ladies of Leathe were with us, I took every precaution—”

“Possibly,” the king cut in. “Possibly you were unknowing victims. But I cannot otherwise account for the fact that Leathe has, for the last decade, been receiving a constant stream of ideas and inventions which the rest of the Pentarchy has never been allowed to have. Nor could I rid myself of a suspicion that the activities of Arth were actually causing the rising of the sea here.”

“Oh, they were, Majesty,” Gladys said. “This is what I came about. Your Great Centaur—”

The king turned his focused spectacles on her. “Then I think you should tell me now, Mrs. — er—”

“Gladys. Well, Majesty—”

“But first tell me about the invasion of Arth,” said the king. “I can’t imagine a person of your powers having no hand in that.”

A shrewd man, she thought. She told him the whole story, aware as she spoke of the unfortunate High Head becoming alternately enraged and desolated in the chair opposite. Len would have managed his feelings better, she thought, though Len was always a bit inclined to be hidebound too. It must go with the man. Having told the king about the capsule, she gave him the facts as she had had them from the Great Centaur. “He was sick,” she concluded. “It was the ideas that did it. He told me that ideas transpose matter — energy — in the most concentrated form there is. Your universe is bloated by this time, Majesty, and ours is getting drained. As I told Lawrence here, it does no good for Arth to trigger this global warming thing with us, because your world is getting filled with what you get from us, and to pull in just another idea from us is going to do more harm than good. It might help more for you to tell us what to do about our trouble.”

“It might,” the king agreed intently.

“But there’s more,” Gladys said. “I’m glad we’ve had this talk, all the four of us together, and you happened to mention Tod, because things are really falling together in my head now. It’s what you said, Majesty, about Leathe getting this whole stream of stuff. I saw that stream, back in the early days. It’s like a great mains sewer, and I’m afraid I know what it is. You see, Tod told me he was set to spy on the man in our Inner Ring — he’s called Mark Lister, and he came out of nowhere suddenly with powers you wouldn’t believe, which always did puzzle me, but I was only just widowed then and I’d other things on my mind, like a row with my daughter, and who was to replace Len in the Ring, and so I kind of let him pass, if you know what I mean. Anyway, Tod said our Mark was the image of a man called Herrel in Leathe—”

“Stop there,” said the king. “I see. Herrel Listanian’s been puzzling us for some time. So not only has the woman Marceny committed an abomination, but she’s poisoned our world doing it. Good. Then I can safely close down Marceny.”

“It seems to me you’d do well to close down this Leathe as well,” Gladys observed.

“Unfortunately I can’t,” said the king. “The ex-High Head here will tell you how Leathe was legally established as the demesne of female mages soon after Arth was established.”

“I could go on for hours about it,” the High Head said bitterly. “It may have started as a safeguard, believe it or not, to separate male and female mageworkers. Now, to cut a long story short, Leathe is established by every magical and legal method possible. It would take a major revolution to unseat those women.”

“You never know,” said the king. “My hope is that it’s begun.” He sat forward. “I’m glad you came to me. Our Powers know what they’re about. As it happens, I am in a position to complete the picture. A regrettable part of our situation with Leathe is that I, too, have agents who spy for me. And reports came out of Leathe this morning that a centaur, a gualdian, a small child, and a young woman have suddenly arrived on the estate of Lady Marceny.”

The High Head and Gladys both cried out together.

“One at a time,” the king said mildly. “Brother Lawrence?”

“It’s impossible!” said the High Head. “I was going to say they couldn’t get out of Arth — but if there’s wild magic in question, I suppose I — But, Your Majesty, you know what they do to gualdians in Leathe. I’m one of the products of it — I know.”

“Yes, indeed,” the king said. “I have Philo very much in mind. My agent has instructions to assist him in every way. And you, madam?” He turned to Gladys.

She had her hands to her face. Jimbo was chittering and nudging her beaded knee. “Poor Zillah,” she said. “Majesty, she’s in love with Mark Lister, and she has power. The moment she sees the other half of Mark, she’ll know. And she’s going to try to put him together again. Majesty, Mark knows all the secrets of the Ring, and he’s a computer expert. That’s too many ideas.”

“It is,” agreed the king. “She’ll have to be stopped.”

“She will be,” said Gladys, and the grimness of her Goddess Aspect came over her. “I must get there at once and stop her.”

4

Zillah wished Marcus would settle down. He had had two-thirds of an Arth day, followed by most of a Leathe day, which ought to have been enough to tire any toddler, and he was still fretfully on the go. The possibilities of all the toys in the bag had long ago been exhausted. The room they were in was little help. It was not exactly a cell, but it was made of stone and only sparsely furnished. Since the light came from a barred grille outside and above the window, Zillah concluded it was a basement room, though she had not noticed going down any stairs when they had been brought here. The door was solid, and locked. Marcus was pounding on it at the moment. She wished he would stop, fall asleep for a while, or at least give her time to think.

She needed to think of the things Lady Marceny had said. Somewhere among the woman’s saccharine words there had surely been something that might help her turn this hopeless situation around. But she could not think of anything, not with Marcus banging away at the door. She also felt she should worry about Philo and Josh, and think of Tod — a sort of moral duty to blame herself for causing disaster to people wherever she went — but she could not concentrate on that either. In fact, the only feeling she had room for, among the distractions Marcus made, struck her as entirely crazy: it was joy. A placid joy. Herrel was here. He would come. She only had to wait.

She told herself, without success, that this could be nonsense. The light from the grid was evening light now. No one had been near them, even with food, since they had been put in this room. Hope should be fading — except it was not hope: it was faith. All the same, since some of Marcus’s restlessness must be due to hunger, it was time to think of something else to take his mind off it.

Zillah got up off the flimsy cot-bed. “Here, Marcus. Stop banging, love. Let’s build a house in the middle of this room.”

Marcus turned and beamed. “Ow,” he agreed.

They assembled what little furniture there was and disassembled it. Marcus was good at taking things apart. He happily reduced the flimsy bed to a pile of rods and laths. For a while, he was diverted by being allowed to do something he had so often been prevented from doing, but he grew fretful again when Zillah tried to encourage him to build the pieces into a hut. Zillah persevered. They had quite a creditable Eeyore-hut made when the door opened and Herrel sauntered in.

Marcus greeted him with loud friendship. “Ow, ow, ow, ow!” he shouted, pointing at the edifice and beating with a spare bed rod.

Herrel grimaced. “Ow indeed. Were you thinking of keeping a pig?”

“OW,” Marcus repeated, conceiving he might have been misunderstood.

“Yes, I know it’s a house, fellow.” Herrel scooped Marcus off the floor, bed rod and all, and went on a remarkable walk with him, straight up the wall beside the window, upside down across the ceiling, and down the opposite wall. Marcus thought it was marvelous and flailed his rod enthusiastically. Showing off, Zillah thought. Showing me party tricks. Maybe showing me that’s what he’s like. These dispassionate thoughts did nothing to counteract her sheer joy. Herrel had come. Her faith was justified.

“More!” Marcus commanded, as Herrel descended to the floor.

“If that’s what you want,” Herrel agreed, and went on a second gravity-defying circuit, this time around the length of the room, up the door and down the far wall, forcing Zillah to back toward the window. She watched his gawky jester’s figure as it walked upside down, head almost brushing the top of the Eeyore-hut. A Joker, the Fool, the Hanged Man. Herrel was telling her all these things. Possibly he was also enclosing the room in some form of protection. She noticed he said nothing of importance until he arrived back, upright in the place where the bed had stood. “The centaur’s still in the grove,” he said. “They can’t budge him. And the little gualdian’s disappeared.”

“Phil — I mean Amphetron?” Zillah said.

“Bilo!” boomed Marcus from Herrel’s arms.

Herrel tapped him on the mouth. “Shut up, you. Neither you or your mother are good at secrets, are you? Fatal to come to Leathe if you can’t keep a secret. Yes, the gualdian. My mother sent sweet Aliky up to him a while back. I suppose the idea was to start with a bit of tempting kindness, but if the girl couldn’t fetch the centaur out of the grove, I can’t see her seducing a gualdian myself. Anyway, she never got a chance. She shot back down, screeching that the room was empty. Now there’s a major search going on. Have you any ideas on this? My mother sent me to ask you. I’m supposed to be interrogating you cruelly.”

Herrel said all this in a light, laughing manner and seemed to be addressing most of it to Marcus. Zillah tried to meet his eyes, but it proved almost impossible. He looked mostly at the top of Marcus’s head.

“He told me — Ph — Amphetron — that he had no kind of gifts at all,” she said. “His family think he’s a runt.” It seemed hard on Philo to devalue him like this, but it was the only help she could give him. If Marceny thought he was worthless and the search relaxed, Philo might just get away. She wished she could think of a way to help Josh. “They wouldn’t really want him for stud, would they?”

“He’s gualdian, runt or not,” Herrel said lightly. “We always want gualdians for stud, and they always try to run. They seem to think it’s a dishonor. Funny state of mind. Those that get away afterward seem to consider themselves outcasts and never go near other gualdians, so I’m told. And the ones that don’t get away always kill themselves.”

“No!” said Zillah.

“Oh yes,” said Herrel. “I was there when my father cut his throat.” Here he did look at Zillah. His face creased into a carefree smile, but behind it she sensed another face — a face not Mark’s but truly Herrel’s, and quite unlike the bearded jester smiling at her — and this face was screaming. It only had access to Herrel’s eyes. Those eyes implored her. “I was only about this fellow’s age,” Herrel added, giving Marcus a little shake. “Zillah, why did you come?”

She wanted to take him in her arms along with Marcus and tell him that it was all right, the agony was over now. But he was facing her across the silly hut, too far away to reach. “I told you,” she said, and managed to enfold him anyhow, in some way not physical, but powerful and sure, in an enwrapping essence of herself from across the hut. “I had to come. I was on Arth and I saw you in a sort of mirror, talking to High Horns.”

“Arth?” he said. “Why Arth? You were safe where you were! You’d left me — Mark — him. I was even glad in a way. I tried to be grateful.”

“Grateful!” she said. “It was so horrible, I left Earth!”

“Yes, but you set me — him — free by leaving, you know. I don’t know how it was — maybe it was the effort I had to put in before that to make sure my mother didn’t know about you — but the moment you were gone, he was practically a free agent. And I thought he might at least repair a bit of the mess over there in your world, and turned him loose with instructions to let otherworld know the way it was being exploited. She’s just found out what he’s done. She’s hard at work trying to punish him at the moment. That’s why I’m here. Zillah, why did you leave me — him?”

His face still smiled at her, but she ignored it and spoke to the face behind. “He — Mark — was so shallow somehow — it was alarming. Then one night I had a kind of vision of him — you — down a deep well with a woman feeding off you. I thought it was Paulie, but it wasn’t, of course. And I was pregnant and there seemed nothing else I could do. I knew it was hopeless. It — it was very horrible for me too. You — he — didn’t even try to find me.”

“We knew better than that,” he said jokingly. “You were safer away from him. But if I’d known about — What’s this fellow’s name?”

“Marcus.”

“Barker,” Marcus agreed sleepily.

“Marcus, I’d have warned you never to go near us — him.” The smile left Herrel’s face at last. “Zillah, you realize that if she finds out who Marcus is, you and I are both dead, don’t you? Now she knows what I— Mark’s done, she’s got very little time for me anyway. A small child of her own flesh and blood is much more malleable.”

“Then she shan’t find out.” Zillah put forth more enfoldings, around Marcus and around Herrel too. “Herrel—”

His head was on one side and he gazed at her. “Goddess!” he said. “The weirdest thing about it is that I’ve barely touched you in my own flesh.”

The stone room was dense with misery.

“Fetch Mark back,” said Zillah. “You need him. Don’t leave him there for her to punish.”

“I told you — I don’t know how. I was out cold all through the ritual.”

She was exasperated. “But you must know! You — it’s instinctive! He’s you!” Herrel was smiling again, hiding his screaming face. Zillah said furiously, “And I bet she used your own strength to cut you in two! She feeds on you all the time. How did you ever let her get that kind of hold on you?”

“I didn’t.” Herrel was entirely back to his light, joking manner. “I was Marcus’s age. There was a ritual — very pretty and impressive — in which I was circumcised and she ate the foreskin.”

“Oh, good God!” Zillah’s anger became blazing disgust. “Why is witchcraft so damn squalid! I think that’s why I’ve never — Look, Herrel, this has to be nonsense. A third of a person’s body cells change every seven years. After more than twenty-one years, she can’t have the remotest hold on you!”

Herrel laughed and jogged Marcus. He seemed hardly to have heard.

“All right,” said Zillah. “If the hold is still there, then you’ve got the same hold over her. Mustn’t that be true?”

“Perhaps Marcus can sort that one out.” Herrel turned merrily away from her. “That do for you, Mother? Full confession from both guilty parties.”

“Yes, thank you, dear. Very nice.” Lady Marceny, dressed now in crimson velvet, approached him along what seemed to be a wide stone terrace. Her train softly dragged over the flagstones behind her. “I heard your part very clearly, Herrel, and I’m quite vexed. But I see you’ve got the child. I may forgive you for that. Bring him along here, dear. The ritual’s all set up.”

Why am I not surprised? Zillah wondered. I’m not even angry. Just numb.

There were women around her, all finely dressed. Their gowns glowed in the orange-ruby light of the sunset filling the sky beyond the trees at the end of the lawn. Was the room where they had been an illusion then? Shame penetrated Zillah’s numbness. She and Marcus must have spent half the day roving about an oblong space on the open terrace. How stupid! But there was no point in thinking about that now. The lawn, about a foot below the terrace, was lit by nine tripods, each holding a blazing fire. There was a low table at their center. On it, knives caught the color of both the sunset and the flames.

5

“How far is it to Lady Marceny’s estate?” Tod asked his cousin as they hurried back along the causeway. “No distance, as the crow flies,” Michael said. “It’s just across the border, but the estuary’s in the way. Since this flooding, you have to go miles round by the road.”

“I’d no idea it was so near!” Tod said. “I’ve never thought of you living next door to a menace like that.”

“Surely you knew?” Michael said, making great booted strides. “This barony was set up to guard the border. That’s what most of the centaurs do here. Until Paul came, we had to employ a mage as well.”

“Paul? Amanda’s new man? Is he a mage then?”

“Not exactly. He’s from Hallow Isle — off the Leathe coast. The people there all get born with some sort of natural antidote to Leathe. It’s genetic.” Michael, Tod thought, sounded a bit curt about Paul.

He was glad to see his cousin was not a complete saint.

“Is that why your mother married him?”

“No,” Michael almost snapped. “Love. I thought we could leave Paul here while we—”

“No,” Tod said. “I take him. You stay.”

“Now, look—!” said Michael.

“You look,” said Tod. “The woman’s grabbed one gualdian already. You’re gualdian on one side, and on the other you’ve got Gordano birthright—”

“I’ve yet to notice either,” Michael said.

“Marceny will. Gods in hellband, she’ll want you even more than she’ll want me! My old dad will never forgive me if I let us both go.”

That seemed to shut Michael up. As they came to the centaurs milling at the end of the causeway, Tod looked up at the great yellowing bowl of the sky. Given luck, they could reach Josh by nightfall. The foremost centaur had a pale wedge of a face, like a slice of white cheese, and was clearly in some kind of authority. Tod snabbled him. “You in charge here? Good. The centaur in the grove isn’t a ghost. He’s Horgoc Anphalemos Galpetto a Cephelad — know the family? Great. And he’s stranded in Lady Marceny’s grove, in bad trouble. Can you choose me all your fastest folk? We’ll need to go in and out quick, and I don’t want anyone left on the way. Tell them to form up round my car in five minutes.”

“Quite the little Pentarch, aren’t we?” Michael murmured.

6

The king appeared entirely unhurried. He gave orders — or rather, issued mild requests to centaurs, humans, and some of the odder folk, some in uniforms and others in sober suiting — all of which, Gladys noticed, were obeyed as if they were commands with the death penalty attached. From this she conjectured that the power he could raise was formidable. It seemed hard on such a small, mild man. And she noticed he was seldom at a loss. In fact, the only time she saw him disconcerted was when he courteously asked his guests what they wished to eat before leaving for Leathe. The High Head asked for passet, Gladys for sausages.

The gnomish-looking lackey stared. The king blinked. It was clear both requests were extraordinary. “And the ether monkey?” the king asked, recovering. “Will he eat?”

“No,” the High Head and Gladys said in chorus. The High Head shot her a venomous look and explained, “Your Majesty, they are not from our band of the Wheel. They are said to live on base energies. No doubt these are plentifully available from this one’s mistress.”

“Well, well,” said the king. “Magus, I realize your position is deeply unpleasant for you, and your future uncertain, but I must insist on courtesy. Would it reassure you if I try to discover what is going on in Arth?”

The High Head’s face showed a terrible eagerness. Poor man, Gladys thought. “If — if that is possible, Your Majesty.”

The king got up and ambled to his desk, where he stood looking out of the window and apparently tapping his desktop aimlessly. “As you know,” he observed, “I seldom do this in person, but I think it is time that I did. Ah. There are not much in the way of tides just now, but something — I should say Someone — has favored me with an excellent wave band. Here we are.”

The window in front of him rippled, dimmed, and became shot with flecks of light. Like a bad television warming up, Gladys thought. As in a television, sound came first. Laughter. Peals of it. One of the laughers broke off to say, “Arth here. Who is it now?”

“If it’s Leathe again, tell them what to do with it,” someone else said.

“This is the king,” stated His Majesty, “wishing to speak to whoever is in charge.”

“Oh—Goddess!” said the first speaker. This was followed by a muttered discussion, giggles, and the sound of a chair falling over.

“Yes, all right — she’s bringing him,” said someone else. “Find some coffee. Quick.”

The window cleared with a flick to bright blue light, and a face twice lifesize looked out of it. It was swaying slightly. For an instant, Gladys had the notion she was seeing the Great Centaur again. But this was a man, trying very hard to look serious and businesslike. He said, with great care, “I am Acting High Head until the coming elections, Your Majesty. How can I help you?”

“Edward!” said the ex-High Head. He looked betrayed.

“Yes, you can tell me what’s going on there,” said the king.

“Well, nothing much at the moment,” Edward replied.

“You’ll have to forgive me, Your Majesty. We’re all very drunk. We’ve been celebrating for a long time — the repeal of Oath and Constitution, you know.” The High Head put his face in his hands.

“Do you intend to draw up new ones?” the king asked.

“In a bit,” said Edward. “I mean, yes, of course, Your Majesty. Someone said they were working on it, I think.” He seemed to realize that this was a little inadequate. He frowned importantly. “We shall ask for two hundred women from the Pentarchy the next time the tides are right. Then we’ll abolish the service-year — and celibacy, of course — and — What? Oh yes. A lot of the mages and most of the cadets want to go home.”

“That seems to be on the right lines,” said the king, “but a little sketchy, High Brother. Add two things to it now. Perhaps if you have a Brother handy to write this down, it would assist you to remember tomorrow, or whenever your party is over.”

Edward turned and made fierce gestures to someone out of sight. A hand appeared, passing him a block of paper and a pen. After a slight tussle, in which Edward attempted to retain the wineglass he had in each hand as well as the paper and pen, and the hand — possibly a female hand — firmly removed both glasses, he turned and nodded owlishly at the king. “Ready.”

“Splendid,” said the king. “Write, One: No further research is to be done on otherworld without written royal permission. Two: The function of Arth is, in future, to supply the Pentarchy with the same sort of inventions that we have hitherto gained from otherworld, and these are to be discovered purely by the Brotherhood’s own unaided efforts.” While Edward laboriously wrote, the king said over his shoulder to Gladys, “I’m ashamed of the way we’ve been sponging on your world — and they can do it themselves, you know. Some of the best brains in the Pentarchy are over there. Is there anything else I should tell him?”

“Ask about our women,” Gladys said.

“Oh yes. Have you got all that down?” the king asked Edward. He nodded, looking as sober as only someone extremely drunk can. “Then the last thing I have to say is about the five otherworld women in Arth. What arrangements have you made to send them home?”

There was an instant outcry. Shouts of “No!” and “Don’t you take our women!” and “They’re staying!” filled the paneled office deafeningly. Edward’s face was jostled out of the screen, replaced by several angry ones, two of them female, and then jostled back. Gladys sighed with relief. Flan and Judy seemed fine.

This time, Edward was icy cold sober. “I’m very sorry, Your Majesty. We have no intention of sending any of the women anywhere. They have asked to stay. We made them all citizens of Arth this morning.” His image vanished with a crash and a slight tinkle, as if someone had broken a large sheet of glass. Evening sun dazzled through the window again.

The king turned away from it. “Well, there you are. I shall go there and try to sort things out in due course, but the next tides are not for nearly two years, I’m afraid, and by that time it will be very hard to remove anyone who wants to stay.”

Gladys shrugged. “That’s five more full sets of ideas.”

“I know,” said the king.

The dejection of all three was interrupted by a footman entering with a trolley. Gladys eyed the carefully sliced black pudding that was the Pentarchy’s notion of sausage and politely said nothing. The king, however, was unable to resist murmuring to her, “How can the man eat passet?”

“My Len had a weak stomach,” Gladys murmured back, “and I daresay he’s just the same. Analogues, you know. Len used to live mostly on potatoes.”

The ex-High Head heard her and looked at her with hatred.

Shortly the king looked at his gold fob watch. “We leave for the Royal Grove in five minutes. Both of you must visit a bathroom before then.”

“I, Your Majesty?” said the High Head. “There is surely no need for me to go to Leathe?”

Gladys did not hear the king’s reply, for a polite young woman arrived just then and led her away to a washroom with decidedly peculiar plumbing. Gladys wrestled with it, thinking that His Majesty was being rather hard on poor old Lawrence. The man’s only fault was to be the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. This mess, after all, went back long before he was born.

She came back to find the High Head dismally resigned. He sat silent in the car that drove them to the Royal Grove. Even Gladys did not guess that the thought of setting foot in Leathe again made the passet churn in his stomach. All he said was, to the king, when they were joined in the dim light under the great trees by seven soberly dressed men who all had the look of mages, “Your Majesty, I hope one of us is familiar with Lady Marceny’s grove. It is usually important to—”

“No, Magus, but we have other reliable facts,” one of the soberly dressed men told him, and he spoke with as much respect as if the one he addressed were still, in fact, High Head of Arth. “We arrive exactly at sunset in that time zone. The grove is of orange trees, and there is a centaur in it.”

His facts were a little out. There were upward of a hundred centaurs in it, all milling about, shouting in deep bass voices. Gladys hurriedly picked Jimbo up, wondering if they had come to the wrong grove. The king’s party was jostled every which way. But hardly had they realized this when one of the centaurs shouted, “Oh, all right then! Let’s all go!” And the whole crowd of huge bodies went thundering away out of the grove.

“Follow them,” said the king. “Quickly.”

7

The journey was exasperating for Tod. He insisted on driving his car, which meant he had to keep to the roads, while the centaurs spread out across country. He and Paul had both been offered a ride on a centaur, but Tod bore in mind that they might have to make a swift and scattered retreat and that Josh would be exhausted. He folded the roof of the car back, which just gave room to cram someone Josh’s size into the rear seat, and drove with the warm wind in his hair and Paul sitting solidly beside him.

No one had a reliable map of the Listanian estate — no doubt Marceny took care there were none. The centaurs tended to get lost at first, until it dawned on their unorganized minds that Tod was able to home on Josh. His birthright led him to be conscious of Philo, Zillah and Marcus too, though Tod did not tell them that. Once he had explained he knew where to go, the centaurs spread out in the lands on either side of the road, and Tod tended to leave them behind on the straights. Where the road bent, the centaurs cut the corners, and he nearly ran one down. In addition, he had not the slightest idea what kind of conversation to make with Paul. They exchanged stilted monosyllables until — Tod supposed it should not have surprised him — Michael suddenly bobbed up in the back, saying, “Hellspoke, Tod! Paul’s a perfectly reasonable human being!”

Paul gave a great shout of laughter, and Tod jumped half out of his skin.

“Oh, Great Centaur, you fool gubbins!” Tod said disgustedly. “And you timed that perfectly, didn’t you? There’s no way I can turn back now, or even kick you out!”

Taking everything together, he thought it quite surprising he only drove down one road that dead-ended.

Sunset came and grew and flared on the meticulous drainage ditches. The land here was as flat as Michael’s barony, though ten times tidier, and well before they reached the place, Tod could see both the grove and Marceny’s mansion as a small clump and a black blot against the sky. The nearer he came, the more certain he was that he was faced with a choice. Josh was still in the grove, all right, but there was worse trouble at the mansion.

In the end the choice was made for him. The road did not go to the grove, but swept around to the left to lead to the mansion. “Michael,” Tod said, hurriedly drawing up, “go and make sure they get Josh out of that grove and back to Riverwell. Stay near a road, and I’ll try to pick you up on my way back. I’ll take Paul to the mansion, if that’s all right with you, Paul?”

“Fine,” said Paul. “Take care, Michael.”

Michael leaped out and ran, splashing through a dyke in a storm of spray, to accost the nearest centaur. Tod swung the car around and roared off toward the mansion, which seemed to be dark, except for a curious flickering among the trees at the back.

Paul said, “There’s something over there with more power than I think I can handle.”

“Now, why do I get that feeling too?” Tod said. He stopped with a shriek at the unlighted front of the house and ran up the steps and in through its open door, brushing aside heavy wardings and strong blocks to right and left like so many cobwebs.

8

There was more power than Zillah knew how to handle. She felt heavy with it, dead. As Marceny set off down the steps to the lawn, with her train of red velvet softly brush-brushing the stone, and Herrel followed carrying Marcus, the women around Zillah moved too. She was forced — by nothing she could see — to walk in their midst. The power was so great that she had to wade rather than walk.

And I might as well be dead anyway with Herrel on two sides at once, she thought, glancing at the girls around her. Pretty, pretty little faces. Don’t any of them care? They seemed to be able to walk perfectly well, although the one on her right in the peacock silk was mincing rather. Zillah glanced contemptuously at the little witch. Glanced again. And her heart knocked, heavily, against the stifling load of power. The girl was dark, with dark eyelashes demurely spread on the cheeks of her pretty little face. Her small hands delicately held up her silken dress as she approached the steps. But she was Philo. No one could have been less like Philo, particularly with those tiny hands and — yes — dainty little feet tripping down the dim stone steps, but Zillah knew it was. There was an essence of him that she could sense, scared, small, very angry, and most definitely Philo inside the disguise. She hoped he would look at her — wink — show in some way he was there and still her friend, but he gave no sign. Perhaps his anger was at Zillah for getting him into this, or maybe he needed all his attention on maintaining the illusion. Zillah feared it was the former.

As they went out onto the lawn among the carefully spaced stands of fire, there was singing. Zillah thought at first that it came from the numbers of dimly seen people gathered at the edges of the turf — presumably people from the estate or workers from the house — but she was soon sure that it did not. It was heavy singing, in one rich but untrained voice. Its tune dragged from one powerful, slumberous phrase to another, bringing sleep with it, numbness, submission, and probably death. Yes, a deathsong, Zillah thought. It came from the source of the heavy power that made it so hard to move. The lawn was a tank, full of it like a heavy liquid.

Marceny took up her position beside the stone table, right in the center, and Zillah instantly knew that the song and the power came from Marceny, even though she had not uttered a sound. Knowing that killed a slight hope. Herrel had said Marceny was currently busy punishing Mark; but any hope that this might drain her strength or concentration went at the sight of Marceny’s closed lips and still face. Zillah could even feel, as a sort of dim strand, the power being diverted toward Mark, and it made no difference to speak of to the strength singing here.

With silent gestures, Marceny sent people to their places. One gesture, and a group of girls was sent to the far end of the table; another, and Zillah was halted among other women at the near end. Zillah was forced to stand and watch Philo go with the first group, separated from her by the length of the table with its gleaming knives. The light from the sky had almost gone by now. Marceny’s red velvet gown glowed bloodily in the flames as she beckoned Herrel, carrying Marcus, up beside her.

A practical color, Zillah thought bitterly. Very practical. But then black witches are, I’ve heard. We all know the Goddess has her dark side. That singing—

— is not the Goddess

It was as if someone spoke. Even more clearly than she had known the nature of Arth, she knew this. Whatever the power Marceny was using, whatever it was that sang, it was something other than any aspect of the Lady. It was very foul. It fed on Herrel, through Marceny, and on other things too. It was very strong. Well, at least I know what we’re up against, Zillah thought. That sounded better than it was. The truth was, she did not know what this thing was. The hopelessness she had thought she felt without Mark was nothing to what she felt now. She was down at the raw end of a chasm where hope simply was not.

The singing stopped. An abiding silence settled.

“Give me the child now,” Marceny said to Herrel. Her voice seemed a small, shrill thing in contrast to the singing.

As Herrel’s arms moved, Zillah said, “Do that, Herrel, and you’re dead meat!”

“He is anyway, dear. Both of you are,” Lady Marceny pointed out. She put out her hands and took Marcus under the armpits. Marcus himself, frightened by the strangeness and remembering he disliked Marceny, clung to Herrel with arms and legs. Herrel simply stood there. Two young women went to help Marceny. Zillah had a glimpse of Philo, staring helplessly.

“Herrel, for God’s sake, stand up to her!” Zillah screamed. She threw every protective strength she had around Marcus.

“Come along to your granny, dear,” Lady Marceny told Marcus. “Let’s have no more nonsense.”

Marcus was removed from Herrel and dumped screaming on the table. He was truly terrified now. Zillah’s protections were broken. It was as if half her being was wrenched from her. She had at that moment some notion how Herrel must have felt when Mark was taken from him. The two girls were undressing Marcus. Marceny, with a firelit knife raised in both hands, was reciting an invocation to the Goddess. The Goddess! That’s rich! Zillah thought. She could not move. The heavy power pinned her at one end of the table. But Herrel was a free agent. Zillah knew he was, even before he turned and looked at her with his eyes screaming and his mouth smiling. Asking me to help! Zillah more or less screamed to herself. You’re asking me to stop Marcus being made like you! You could stop it, Herrel, in an instant, if you wanted to. You’re so strong that that being infesting your mother feeds and feeds and you still carry on!

Herrel, of course, could not want to. He could not want anything that had been taken from him to make Mark.

Zillah was in the act of kicking Herrel aside mentally as useless, when she saw that this wronged him. Herrel had done one small thing. He had done it for Marcus. On the table, Marcus was screaming and threshing and surrounded by a small, triangular space of his own. It seemed to be the ghost of the Eeyore-hut. Marcus was mentally crouching in it, disseminating the one protection small children have — fear. Fear beat in waves over the two women trying to undress him and slowed their movements. Even the knife in Marceny’s hands showed a slight tremor. And his screams were horrible.

What’s this supposed to do? Zillah thought angrily. Yet she knew. Herrel had made the circuit of that illusory room, and made it just real enough for Marcus to use. It was all he thought himself able to do. The slight breathing space this gave, Zillah was supposed to use to confront Marceny.

And I can’t! she thought. Doesn’t he know I couldn’t even face my own mother? I just had to leave. I couldn’t even look Marceny in the eyes, and he expects me to—

Ah then, she thought. I must fetch Mark here. There was no time to consider it impossible. They had Marcus undressed now. “Philo, help me!” she called out above the drone of Marceny’s invocation, and threw her mind toward Earth and Mark.

Tod came out on the terrace to see Marcus naked and Marceny in the act of blessing the knife. His birthright, at the sight, ramped within him like an enraged beast. Maybe it was anger, maybe it was the strange negative presence of the man Paul behind him, but he felt it, for the first time for years, spring out of his control. It seemed to be going wild. He was terrified. And he could be no use like this. Then he heard the voice of his old tutor, saying, “Even now it will sometimes take over, and you’ll find it knows what it’s doing.” Well, I just hope he was right, Tod thought, and let it go.

He found himself calling out in a great voice, far deeper than his own. “Stop this! This dirties the name of the Goddess. I forbid it!”

At the other end of the lawn, a flying pale shape crashed through the trees and burst among the watching people. Tod, to his astonishment, saw Josh, whom he had confidently thought to be safely on his way to Frinjen, gallop among the pans of fire and slow gradually as the heavy ponding of power caught him. Josh came to a halt between two fires, facing Tod, pawing the turf angrily. “Leave that child alone, woman!” he panted. “I tell you—”

A timeless stillness was suddenly present.

Oh, thank Heaven! Zillah thought. Space. The space Herrel had tried to give her through Marcus. Marceny and the women around her were still moving, but in the slowest of slow motion, and if Marceny was still chanting, her voice was too slowed and lengthened to hear. Zillah knew what had happened. Tod and Josh had accidentally — if such a thing could ever be accidental — taken up the positions of a ritual of their own. They stood to east and west. Philo was to the south, and Zillah herself to the north. There was someone strange with Tod, who had the effect of dimming the other women with Marceny, so that the heavy power was forced to draw in around the table to protect itself. What Zillah had here now was the space peculiar to magic — which might last a second or many hours — and in which she could work.

And how do I? she wondered. Power. They all had power. Tod’s was trained, but it seemed to be running wild in anger at the moment. Josh and Philo had certainly been taught, but the tuition in Arth, it had always seemed to her, had been beside the point for both of them. Whatever they had was almost untrained. As for herself, anything she had was as feral as a wild animal.

Well, then we call it wild, she said, and called.

Wild it was. It lifted her in an exultant sheeting gust so long and so far that she lost all sense of time, or of her own body. She was all mind for a nano-second that seemed to last a thousand years. Understanding filled her. This was why she had always ducked out, refused training in witchcraft, run from Amanda’s kind of education. The restraints of knowledge harmed this wild power. In order to use it, Zillah could not know what it was. It would only answer a being as untrammeled as itself. It was wildness. Zillah hung in its exultant aurora borealis, exulting herself, because she had always known this about wild magic really. The instant, and the knowledge, extended infinitely. Her forgotten body sheeted across time with her, or shrank to the smallest instant, most strangely. Sometimes she had been a giant for hours, and then a small blob for a century. The knack, she discovered, was not to let it distract you. After a millennia-long instant, she was in a house she only remembered seeing once before, where a wild sending stalked around the borders of its safety, rattling windows, howling in the chimney, and snapping trees. There was a jungle of huge potted palms. She thought she had found the wrong place, until she heard her sister’s voice.

“I know, Paulie. But whoever sent it has harnessed wild magic. Part of the strength is the wild magic objecting. I can’t stop it, and I don’t think any of us dare go out, even if it is only after Mark.”

Gladys’s house, but most oddly empty of its owner. Amanda was there, standing by the hearth, and Mark was a little aside, staring at the potted trees. He looked pale even for him. Zillah took the wild magic prowling around the house, united it to her own fourfold power, and promised it freedom shortly.

“Mark,” she said. “Come with me quickly. I need you back with Herrel.”

Amanda straightened. “The sending’s gone! I—Zillah! Zillah, what do you want?”

“I’ve come for Mark,” she said. “He has to go back. It’s necessary.”

The frown Zillah knew so well collected above Amanda’s nose. “Why is that?”

She might have known, Zillah thought, that things would not be easy with Amanda in it. Mark was now somehow on the other side of Amanda, looking puzzled. “Mark,” Zillah explained, “is half of another man from another universe.”

“We know,” Amanda said, and turned to speak to another presence whom Zillah could only dimly discern. “Yes, but be quiet, Paulie. It’s Zillah. She wants Mark.” At this, the other presence seemed to raise an outcry, but Amanda turned impatiently back to Zillah. “Zillah, are you in this other world?”

“Yes, and in terrible trouble. That’s why we need Mark.”

Amanda raised her head and became more than herself. “Zillah, this man is badly flawed. For one thing, he’s been spying on us.”

“Not intentionally, or voluntarily,” Zillah said.

“There are other flaws,” Amanda answered. “Do you really want him?”

“The other half is even worse,” Zillah protested. “I love him both. Amanda, he must come, or I’ll die, Marcus will be enslaved, and Mark will probably die, too, when Herrel’s killed. Please.”

Amanda’s head was still raised. She said, with unearthly sadness, “Zillah, I’m sorry, but taking Mark makes a terrible imbalance. You could destroy two worlds.”

“Then I’ll balance!” Zillah cried out. “You help. Wait a second.”

The next second, or maybe at the same time, she had taken wing on the fourfold wild magic — some of which protested and was soothed — and was in the presence of Amanda again, only with a difference. This Amanda walked through a strange room with painted panels, and her hands were nervously clasped to her mouth.

“I tell you I can’t see at this juncture,” she said to someone out of sight. “It could go any way. How I wish I hadn’t let them all go off! Or I should have gone too. What a hellbound coward I am!”

Amanda should always grow her hair that long, Zillah thought admiringly. It looked beautiful. “Amanda!”

The woman jumped and turned. “You need help?”

“Badly. Take on your Aspect and balance. Balance for your life! Here.” Zillah tossed the woman she hardly knew what — a thread, or a spark, or a skein — and to her relief and gratitude, the woman made dismissing motions to the person she had been talking to and seized what Zillah threw in competent hands.

“A moment,” Zillah heard her say. “I’m summoned as Priestess.”

She was back with her sister, flinging her another version of the thread or spark. “Balance.” This Amanda, not so used to balancing, needed Zillah’s attention more. Zillah hung between the two, holding, helping, while energy poured and thundered. It dinned around her, fell in avalanches and slid like lava, smoking and roaring. The wild magic of the sending fled shrieking upon it and was gone. Clouds scudded like boulders. When it stopped, it seemed too soon, but Zillah was spent. She hung in front of her sister, knowing she was only there on energies Josh and Philo and Tod were lending her to use.

“Amanda, let me have Mark now. Please. I’ve done all I could.”

“I know.” Amanda was holding on to the mantelpiece with one hand. She looked exhausted. She waved the other hand wearily at Mark. “You have to ask him, Zillah. He’s not a pawn.”

“Mark,” she said faintly. “Come home with me? Please?”

Mark seemed to see her for the first time. “Zillah? You want me?”

The look on his face set the other presence squalling again.

“… about the insurance?” Zillah heard. “All those bills and our mortgage.”

“Always,” she said, holding out her arms through the noise.

He walked into her arms gladly.

9

“I don’t get on with all this transposing, or whatever they call it,” Gladys grumbled to Jimbo. They had no sooner arrived in the grove and seen all the great rumps of those centaurs rushing away than they were somehow ahead of them, on a lawn lit by a set of barbecues and standing beside another centaur. This one was smaller and whiter, as far as she could see. She could hear the High Head muttering something about how little light there was.

The king’s seven mages appeared to agree. They all raised light — something she would have given her toes to be able to do — great pearly blue globes of it between each man’s hands. Then she realized they had arrived in one of those utter stillnesses which meant the working of magic was in progress. What she saw, the female in bloodred, the child on the table, and the knife, nearly caused her to rush forward and interrupt. But the king raised a warning hand, and she saw it was a different stillness.

It was over in that instant. A girl — Zillah — sagged onto the end of the table. The small white centaur started forward, and so did two other people from the terrace-thing at the back. The red woman seemed about to bring the knife down, but the man dressed like a jester calmly leaned over and took the child off the table.

“Not this time,” he said. “Not him too.” The red woman stared and then screeched, “Herre!!” The jester-man turned away. “Give me his clothes, Aliky. He’s freezing.”

At this moment Jimbo vanished from Gladys’s arms. She cried out, “Jimbo!” and cried out again when she saw him briefly on the table where the child had been. He loomed like a mad spider in the queer light, and the shadows gave him far too many arms. In another jolt of movement, he was on the red woman. His voice beat and howled through her head, “WRONG GREED! FOUL EATER! GREED!” with such force that Gladys nearly fell over, although she knew Jimbo was not shouting at her. She saved herself on the flank of the white centaur and stared at him attacking the woman. She had never known Jimbo do such a thing before.

The woman screamed. It looked as if she hid her face in her arms. Then she grew other arms and flailed at the ether monkey. An instant later it was clear that there was another thing, many-armed like Jimbo, emerging from the woman’s substance to fight back. There was, for another instant, a scrawl of flailing limbs and a hideous low howling, before the fabric of that world seemed to become too flimsy for the creatures, and for the woman too. Everything elongated around them, blurred and stretched, so that the tearing and howling was going on in a deepening pit composed of lawn, table, house, terrace — until it tore under the strain and snapped back, leaving a vibrating bare space.

10

Wrapped together in the nightmare bodiless intimacy of the sepia space, Joe-Maureen looked up and screamed. A fighting tangle of glossy black limbs, with something fraying and shredding among them, plunged toward them, filling the whorls with senseless howlings. He-she struggled aside, threw herself askew, and then threw himself backward. The tangle plunged wailing past, barely missing them, and vanished on downward, spraying them as it went with hot acid redness, that lashed them agonizingly with salt.

“Blood!” screamed Maureen. “That was real matter!” Joe’s reply was “I want out. Up this way?”

“I don’t care anymore,” she said. “I’d do anything.” He said, “You might have to. You realize we’re stuck with one another after this, do you?”

She knew he was right. The nightmare enwrapment meant that she knew he knew a myriad small, disgraceful things about her, for instance, the way she had pushed poor old Flan Burke into going in the capsule just in order that Flan might not rival her in the troupe. And she knew the same things about him. What he had done to that man Wilfrid in Arth, for example. Wilfrid may have deserved it, but Joe had been vile, just vile. These and thousands of other pieces of knowledge bound them so tight that nothing short of murder could release them — and even murder was out of the question, for what one thought, the other would know. “I’ll settle for that,” she said.

“Me too,” he said. “Up now. I think this is how. It’ll take a while.”

Eventually there was a sense of rising. Altogether elsewhere, in the sealed flat, their two flaccid bodies stirred on the sofa.

11

Gladys was crying. “I’m all right,” she told everyone mendaciously.

“I knew Jimbo had an enemy. I thought he was running away from it, but I see now he was just waiting his chance to come here. But he was a good friend of mine — Oh, good God, my girl! Haven’t you ever dressed a child before? Let Auntie Gladys. Put him down on the table. Give me his clothes. Is this all he’s got? Lord, it’s filthy!”

She was briskly heaving Marcus back into his pyjama suit when the other centaurs charged in among the trees and galloped shouting across the lawn, overturning the fire tripods as they came. She turned around.

Her face was fit to look at by then. “If someone doesn’t do something, I’ll—!”

The king, in some tranquil, unguessed manner, contrived to surround the table in a bubble of peace. His mages gathered into it. Against a dark background of running centaurs all intent on smashing things, pursued hither and thither by a redheaded young man in wellies, who seemed to want to stop them, the king looked at the weary company gathered around the table. Tod was sitting on it with his arms around Josh.

“I don’t think we have broken the law,” Josh said aggressively.

“Not at all,” said the king. “It is a year since your service began. Besides, things have changed, over in Arth.” He nodded pleasantly to the girl who had tried to dress Marcus. “Thank you, Miss Aliky. I think you’d better return to Ludlin with us. Your cover is probably blown.” His round glasses went on to focus on Philo, leaning on the end of the table in the rags of a green cotton dress. “I take it you were able to help this young gualdian?”

Aliky giggled. “Not that much. He’s better at illusion than anyone I’ve ever met. All I did was put the idea in his head, Your Majesty.”

Philo grinned, soft but tired. “I almost had fun hunting the mansion for myself — but I was scared silly really, sir. I think only Zillah gues — oh!”

Everyone glanced at Zillah and Herrel perched face-to-face on the corner of the table, and saw that they were lost to everyone but each other.

“That makes two good women gone,” Tod murmured regretfully to Josh.

The king had looked on to Paul. “Hallow Isle?” Paul nodded in a way that was near a bow.

Gladys by now had done up every snap on the pyjama suit. “There. Dirty but warm. Majesty, there is the matter of stopping this one’s mother from—”

“Too late,” said the king.

Gladys glanced keenly at Herrel. The jester’s clothes now enclosed a normal man, with an air of Mark to him. “I see what you mean. Now what?”

“Things are actually much improved,” the king said. “Zillah, I think, must have had the sense to call on someone to balance. And that abomination which inhabited Lady Marceny had sucked up a surprising amount. I felt a great wad of something tear loose when it went. This has made things a great deal better, although a little still remains. Zillah and her son, for instance. Excuse me, sir.”

He tapped Herrel’s shoulder, firmly. “Yes, you. Would you mind telling me your plans for the future?”

Herrel turned reluctantly, saw who it was, and stood up. “My idea was — well, Zillah wants to live here, and I suppose the estate is mine now. I’d like to secede from Leathe and make Listanian part of the Orthe. Is that possible, Your Majesty? It’s been a dream of mine ever since I was a boy.”

“It seems a good idea,” said the king. “But—” He sighed and shook his head at Gladys, because Herrel had already turned back to Zillah. “So we are still less than balanced. I take it you are returning, madam?”

“Of course,” said Gladys. “I’ve more than twenty cats — unless that daughter of mine has put them in the pot. There’s no knowing with that girl. Yes, I am going back — just as soon as someone’s told me what I do about global warming when I get there. That’s what started all this — the mess Arth made of my world — and I tell you straight, I don’t go without an answer, Majesty.”

“Here is your answer,” said the king. “You must take the ex-High Head of Arth back with you.”

At this Gladys said, “Oh, look here! The poor man!” and the High Head said, “Your Majesty, I refuse.”

“You may not refuse, either of you,” the king said. “Magus Lawrence has in his head all the lore of Arth, which is a very great weight of ideas. He also started your global warming. It is therefore just that he try to put it right.”

“Your Majesty, I don’t know how—” the High Head was forced to confess.

“Then you must go there and try,” the king said. “It is my will. Go now.”

Tod had never felt the king raise his will before. The force of it astounded him. Everyone stirred under it, like trees in a breeze. The High Head bowed. Gladys stood up in a clack of beads and held out her hand to him. “Come along, dear.”

He took her hand and they walked away toward a wood in the distance, not quite in the space where the centaurs still rushed about. “I have foresworn women,” everyone heard the High Head warn Gladys as they left.

“That’s all right, Lawrence,” her voice answered. “I’ve been a widow for years. But you’ll have your stomach cared for. I hope you like cats.”

The going of Gladys deprived Marcus of someone to talk to. He was warm now, and no longer frightened, and beginning to feel lively. He looked hopefully at Tod, but Tod, for some reason, was doubled over in fits of laughter. He looked at Philo and Josh and saw they were in the not-just-now-I’m-tired mood. Aliky didn’t know enough; nor did the serious men holding lights. He looked at Zillah. No, she and the man who walked on ceilings were not-now-I’m-busy. That left only one. Marcus pulled the king’s sleeve and pointed a starfish hand at the busily galloping centaurs.

“Ort bake ow,” he remarked. “Bad doubt.”

The king stared at him. “I do beg your pardon. I didn’t quite catch that.”