A Sudden Wild Magic

1

Tod was not happy. It did not make him feel any better to know he had not expected to be happy in Arth. He was only there because his father had insisted on it.

“It’s your legal obligation, I’m afraid, son,” the Pentarch told him. “I wouldn’t bother you with it if it wasn’t. Hated my stint in the place. Stupid rules and out-of-date notions. They say it’s even more of a back number these days. Lost its point, to my mind, as soon as all the new technology came in. But the law still says that the heir to a Pentarchy has to have his year in Arth. If you don’t, you don’t qualify as my heir, son, and the king could roll me up as well as you. He might, too. I’ve had several polite inquiries from the Royal Office about you. You’ll have to go.”

Tod liked and trusted his old father. He got on with him, even though the old man behaved like a swine to Tod’s mother. So he did not make the fuss he might have done. He gave up his lovely, happy, easygoing life — his expensive car, his good-looking girls, his racing and antiques collecting, his first-class food — he was an adult, for the gods’ sake, and could afford to have these things! — and entered the austere regime of Arth without doing more than grumble savagely to himself.

Now, nearly two months later, Tod kept wondering how his father had been able to stand it, even as a young man. Poor old August! he kept thinking. How had he stood the soldierly bunk rooms, for a start? Not to speak of the food. Drink — forget it! Anything but weak passet beer was against the rules because it disturbed the vibes, so they said. There was a rule against almost everything enjoyable on these grounds. It irked Tod almost to fury at times, even though he had been prepared for it.

What he had not been prepared for was to find his fellow servicemen were — with two exceptions — complete louts. Stupid louts, too. That had surprised Tod, because he had heard that only the best young men qualified for Arth. But these were not only stupid, but the kind of louts who resented Tod for his high birth and got at him for it whenever they could. They did not seem to grasp that Tod’s birth was nobody’s fault, or that Tod could have melted them to little pools of body fat if he’d wanted. So far Tod had refrained from doing anything to them. But it was severe temptation — all the more so because the servicemen were never out of one another’s company. The cadets and the qualified Brothers kept themselves priggishly separate and would barely speak to Tod and his like.

Well, that was no loss. Except that it probably made the days in Arth even more boring — though nothing could be more boring than the mageworks servicemen were required to perform. Take this very moment. They were all ranged along the wide window of the lowest observation room, sighting the specula for patterns in the ether. This was something Tod had been trained from the cradle to do, like almost everything else in the curriculum. Old August, having made sure that his son indeed carried the birthright, had had him tutored by experts from the moment he could walk. But nobody took any notice of that. The reverse, in fact. Their Mage Instructor, a po-faced fellow called Brother Wilfrid, told Tod on the first day, “We’re going to treat you just like everyone else.” When people said that, in Tod’s experience, they meant worse than everyone else—and so it had proved. Brother Wilfrid, just like the louts, resented Tod’s birth and smugly punished him for it. While the louts struggled with mageworks that ought, in more intelligent hands, to have been at least slightly interesting, Tod was stuck with base calculus and childish observations like the ones he was making at the moment. These were so easy that Tod could do the whole thing in his mind without the help of specula. He could even spot a growing disturbance in the ether, off to one side, troubling several bands of the Wheel, which nobody else seemed to have noticed. He was going to have to render himself odious to the louts by pointing it out soon. Brother Wilfrid would, of course, regard this as showing off. Tod sighed, and bent over the instrument he did not need. Dreary, boring days of schoolboy exercises and mass rituals, and still ten months to go. The rituals were perhaps not as bad as Tod had expected. This latest High Head — little as Tod liked him — seemed to have done quite a bit of work bringing the ritual side of things up-to-date, even though he had done nothing at all to change the archaic rules of the Brotherhood. Take the celibacy rule, now. That was idiotic, because no one had any chance to break it. Tod had expected to find that particular rule the hardest of all, but in fact, without any girls passing daily before him, he found he missed them far less than he had supposed he would. It was not as if he had left behind someone he was passionately in love with — that would have hurt. No, the irksome part of that rule was the inevitable advances one got from mages and brethren alike. Ridiculously, Tod had not been prepared for that; but he had, from very early on, learned to carry in his aura the message I am heterosexual at all times, day and night. It was a pity Philo, the gualdian boy, could not seem to learn to do that too — or maybe Philo’s incredible politeness stopped him — anyway, Tod suspected that Philo was building up a horribly large list of senior folk out to get him, either because Philo had politely told them no, or because they were scared rigid that Philo was going to report the passes they had made to higher authority.

All right, Tod thought. So I’m not the only one having a hard time. I still don’t have to like it.

He had been rather thrown together with Philo and Josh, the centaur lad. They were the three different ones, and they were all finding it tough here. Poor Josh — he went around perpetually bewildered. Up to now, Tod had not realized how much centaur magework and teaching differed from human. The Arth system was human-based, and Josh could not grasp it at all. Everyone thought he was stupid. The louts made fun of him all the time. They were laughing at Josh at the other end of the room at the moment. It sounded as if there was another practical joke starting.

Ah gods! Tod thought savagely. This was all I needed! He had many times tried to conjecture why in hellspoke’s name the law required him to come to this armpit of the universe. It was a very archaic law. The only modern justification he had been able to come up with was that all this adversity was supposed to toughen his soul. To Tod’s mind you did not make a soul tough by walking all over it: you just made dents.

And all the time he had this nagging anxiety. The time rate was so much slower in Arth that nearly three years would pass before he could get home, years in which his father would get even older. August Gordano was not young: he had been nearly sixty when Tod was born. Tod was terrified he would get home to find his father dead. Then.

Yells and laughter erupted at the other end of the room. Tod looked.

There was poor Josh inside a ring of louts, the ringleader as usual being Rax with the broken nose. Josh was standing helplessly up to the withers in a pile of horse manure — or it looked like horse manure, but it was evidently as hard as concrete. Josh was trying to buck his way out, but much to the mirth of his tormentors, the stuff was holding him fast. As Tod looked, someone took the joke further, picked up a ball of the stuff and flung it at Josh. Josh was quite unprepared. He screamed and put both arms over his face. The next second he was being pelted, bowed over, with blood streaming down his face. It looked as if one of his eyes was smashed. Tod left his instrument and ran. Philo, who was nearer, ran ahead of him. Tod shouted to him not to, but he saw Philo plunge up the pile of concrete dung and try to spread himself out in front of Josh. Tod heard the thud of concrete hitting his body.

“Right! That bloody does it!” Tod said. Still running, he called up his birthright. It was intensely strong, here in Arth, as they had warned him it would be. He took hold of the big, dynamic rhythms of the citadel and used them to thrust Philo away to the far wall. Then he hurled that concrete dung in all directions in a near-explosion, scoring a hit on a lout with almost every ball. Josh burst loose from the pile and staggered about with his hands to his face, only half-conscious. Tod took further energies, formed them into spears of healing, and beamed them at Josh in strong thrusts. But at this point the other servicemen turned on Tod in a pack, and he had to leave off to defend himself.

He didn’t dare kill them. He fought them instead. He felt like a fight anyway. He made sure each one he hit got a fair voltage of electricity with the blow. For a joyous few seconds he was inside a pandemonium of fighting bodies, blows, screams, and swearing, with stinking cobbles rolling about underfoot and electricity crackling and arcing all over the place. Then, as was to be expected, Duty Mages and Senior Brothers stormed into the room from all directions. A fair amount of stasis was cast. Tod could have broken it, had he tried, but someone had hit him in the stomach the instant before, and he did not feel like trying anything just then.

When he felt more himself, he was — as he supposed he should have expected — being blamed for everything. Rax had run the street gangs of Praslau before coming to Arth. He was an expert in shifting blame. Besides, after the healing Tod had thrown at Josh, nobody thought there was too much wrong with his eye, and Philo, though dazed, was only bruised. They were marched off to Healing Horn. Tod, licking a swelling lip, had to stand and endure a po-faced lecture from Brother Wilfrid. He stood. He endured, wondering anxiously throughout whether he had been in time to save the sight in Josh’s eye, and controlled his temper while Brother Wilfrid lectured on about the damage done to the vibrations of Arth. Tod might have got away merely with that lecture had not Brother Wilfrid then said, “And thanks to your folly and aggression, Galpetto could well lose an eye.”

“I saved his eye, you fool!” Tod roared at him. “Don’t give me that po-faced rot!”

Brother Wilfrid’s breath went in. His eyes and his mouth became vicious lines. “You don’t speak to people like that here. No one here is your servant.”

“No, thank the Goddess,” said Tod. “If you were my servant, I’d sack you for sanctimonious stupidity. Plus incompetence.”

That did it. Tod was marched off in disgrace before the High Head himself. And naturally the system was that Brother Wilfrid nipped in through the veil and had his say before Tod got near the High Head.

“Well, what have you got to say?” the High Head asked. He was in worn blue fatigues at that moment, and his office was spread all over with tide charts, but Tod found him unexpectedly impressive even so.

“As what I’ve got to say is probably the opposite of everything Brother Wilfrid told you,” Tod said angrily, “I think I’ll pass on that.”

The High Head surveyed Tod’s incipient black eye and swollen lip, his disordered hair and aggressive anger, and tried to conquer his prejudice against Tod and be equitable. “Servicemen are always brawling,” he said. “I’m prepared to believe your cause was just. But you’re not here for fighting, or the damage to the centaur’s eye.” Tod ground his teeth audibly at this. “You are here for causing acute disturbance in every band and spoke of the Wheel. Can’t you feel what you’ve done? If not, look.” The High Head gestured to his large mirror, which was boiling and tumbling with the mixed rainbows of a large cosmic disorder. “You did that, Gordano, by raising wild magic.”

The injustice of this was almost too much for Tod. “With respect, sir, I did not do any such thing. First, I did not use wild magic, because I have been very well trained from as far back as I can remember. What I did was to draw on my birthright in the ways I have been taught. Second, sir, that cosmic storm was brewing at least an hour ago. I saw it on the speculum quite clearly.”

“Then why did you not report it?” asked the High Head.

“Because I assumed Observer Horn is full of highly trained Brothers who would report it long before I did,” said Tod.

“There is no need to be insolent,” said the High Head.

“Yes there is,” said Tod. “If I speak normally in this damned joyless place, some po-faced prat ups and tells me I’m being insolent. So if I’m insolent, it ought to work the other way round. Sir.”

They stared at each other with considerable dislike, while the High Head wondered which of twenty scathing things to say. And which of thirty condign punishments to order. None of them seemed nasty enough for this nasty piece of work, who could nearly put a serviceman’s eye out and then show no contrition whatsoever, who refused to acknowledge he had caused a cosmic storm, who—

The upper off-center mirror spoke, blazing the sigil of Observer Horn. “Sir, there appears to be a supply capsule out of control outside the atmosphere.”

The Observer sigil was almost instantly joined by sigils in every other mirror. That of Housekeeping blazed, Defense, Maintenance, Observer again, Healing, Calculus. Each sigil brought a new voice, speaking in crisp sequence.

“Housekeeping here, sir. There’s a capsule outside the air that’s definitely not one of ours.”

“Defense Horn, requesting permission to explode a strange capsule, sir. We divine some kind of foreign life aboard it which could be dangerous.”

“This is Maintenance, sir. There’s a capsule plunging straight at our atmosphere. If it gets any closer, it could breach us, sir.”

“Sir, we are now in contact with a mind in distress inside the supposed supply capsule. Person seems human and says the controls don’t answer.”

“Healing, Healing. Be wary. There are dead humans aboard a capsule outside. Be wary. It could be plague.”

“Calculus Horn reports, sir, with some shame, that the cause of the current cosmic storm appears to be a rogue capsule that entered Arth from elsewhere in the multiverse some twenty seconds ago.”

“Ritual Horn, sir. Be wary. Alien magework is affecting our efforts to damp the storm.”

Tod gazed from sigil to sigil, almost admiringly. What a display of order and efficiency. No sigil occupied a glass already in use by another. The voices spoke precisely in turn. It was all so cool that he had to force himself to realize that this must be an emergency, that there must be people in bad trouble outside the citadel.

The High Head snapped an order to Defense Horn to hold off their attack for a while and drew in the air the symbol for the emergency rescue of a transport. As artificial elementals sped howling down the corridors, screaming their orders to the heads and other ranks of the Horns involved, he swung around to Tod again. What those people out there thought they were doing in this capsule, he had no idea, but Edward’s message had not been lost on him. Corpses. Possibly plague. Good. “Gordano, you go to the upper rescue port and tell them to put you into a safety suit. I want you to be first man to board that capsule. Your punishment is to deal with whatever you find inside it.”

2

They had not expected the weightlessness. It happened after the second heavy jolt. Zillah found herself rising above her seat and grabbed for Marcus as he floated away from her, still asleep. The space ahead of her was full of floating bodies, lying in the air at all angles, some threshing about, some clinging to seats. Something was on fire down there, in four different places. People were making frantic efforts to beat flames out with hands that suddenly worked to different rules, and rebounding to the ceiling — which was now a side wall to Zillah — with the force of their efforts.

“I told them — I told her so!” Roz Collasso was crying out. “The place does have defenses! They’ve gone and burnt our virus-magic! Now what do we do?”

Along the sideways ceiling Zillah had an upside-down glimpse of Judy’s arm, ridged with straining tendons, shaking and shaking at the woman beside her. It was Judy’s voice doing all the screaming. “Something’s wrong with Lynne! Somebody help me! None of these controls work!”

A small, energetic person swooped down to Judy. Flan Burke, Zillah thought. Judy’s screams redoubled. “Flan, Flan, Lynne’s dead! I don’t know what to do! Somebody hel—!” There was the sound of a smacking blow. Flan’s body came arcing up again with the force of it.

“Shut up, Judy!”

The fires must have gone out. The metal space was murky with smoke, and a lot of people were coughing, including Judy, who was coughing and sobbing together, but there were no flames anymore. Everyone was sinking slowly toward what had been the right-hand wall. Some small pull of gravity seemed to be coming from there.

“We’re falling,” said the big black girl, among coughing and retchings.

“Falling where?” demanded Roz.

Judy’s voice was now low and grinding. “How the hell should I know? You can hit me all you like, Flan, but it won’t do any good. This screen’s no use at all. Look, if you don’t believe me!”

Among the crowding bodies, Zillah had a slowly rotating view of a screen over the two empty drivers’ seats, alight with meaningless colored whorls. Whatever they were receiving, it was not in the usual manner of VDUs, but in wide-spaced, wavy bands which changed width perpetually.

“And our viruses are gone,” Judy said dully. “And we don’t know where we are.”

“What do we do, supposing we are in Laputa-Blish?” asked a girl with a stiff, gangly body.

“Do what we came to do without the virus, of course, you stupid bitch,” Flan Burke said as she rotated, knees to chin, through Zillah’s view. She looked both fierce and comfortable. “Do you think we came for a holiday?”

“Flan’s right,” Roz proclaimed. “We mount an attack regardless.”

The walls, seats, and ceiling had been rotating spirally about them as they talked, spinning everyone into a kind of plait along the length of the Celestial Omnibus. Now the motion changed again. Zillah found herself falling, gently and inevitably, together with half the floating company, toward the rear of the capsule.

“What’s going on now?” someone squawked from the other end of the aisle. That aisle now stood up from Zillah like a tube, and people hung there at the other end with outspread arms, inexplicably.

“Rotation, that’s all. We must be flipping over and over. Gives us gravity at both ends.”

Whoever said that must be right, Zillah thought, as her feet landed on the silvery wall that concealed the life support. She could hear it hissing beyond the metal. She hoped it was meant to hiss. It sounded nastily like a gas leak. She had a vivid vision of the capsule turning over and over in space, perhaps endlessly. She had been mad to bring Marcus. He was stirring and mumbling against her shoulder, disturbed by the hissing and the changes of gravity — perhaps also by Zillah’s own rising panic. In a moment she was going to be screaming like Judy, and that would wake Marcus.

She soothed him and she rocked him, trying to throw her panic into the distance, out, away, into whatever appalling emptiness surrounded the capsule. Marcus calmed. He slept steadily again. Zillah tried to convince herself that she was calm, too, by turning to the young man who had landed curled up on the backrest of the seat sticking out of the wall beside her. He was nice-looking. She did not know him well, but she thought his name was Tam — Tam Fairbrother, or something like that.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I know it seems silly, but I only got here at the last minute. What is the attack Roz and Flan were talking about? Can you put me abreast of the plans?”

Tam did not answer. This puzzled Zillah at first. It took her a long, difficult minute to realize that Tam was dead. So was everyone else at this end of the capsule.

3

Tod was given an all-over gossamer-thin suit with smickering suction-soles. The soles were the only things that impeded him as he walked into the big, tranparent bubble of the rescue port. The rest of the suit was Arth’s secret, some kind of time-tested magework that allowed a man to breathe and move normally while protecting him from vacuum, germs, and even fire. Exploring it as he walked, Tod thought it was simply a hundredfold thickness of any mage’s usual protective circle — in which case, it must have taken years to make. However it was done, it was a wondrous efficient thing. The High Head may have intended this as a punishment, but Tod felt like a schoolboy on a treat. He stared out and around into the cerulean blueness beyond the port’s bubble and finally detected the silvery flash-flash of the rogue capsule turning over and over as it fell toward the citadel from about the ten o’clock position.

“This is something like!” he murmured. Up till then he had hardly believed there really was a capsule.

It was coming fast, too, enlarging rapidly as he watched it. Behind him, safe inside the walls, a monitoring mage murmured reports of what he was able to gather from the shocked minds inside the thing. Another, from Calculus, spoke crisp figures about speed, position, and deflections due to the storm the thing itself was arousing. Some other higher Brother was relaying orders to ranked mages from Ritual Horn, who were supposed to apply the brakes to the hurtling object. Tod could also hear various kinds of rescue teams gathering in the bubble at his back, but they kept away from him because, of course, he was in disgrace.

“Now!” said the higher Brother. Tod felt the force go out.

They had done it, too! The rotating silver shape swept to one side and whirled out of sight beyond the blue wall of the citadel. But they had cut it fine to Tod’s mind. The thing had surely all but impinged on the nearly unseeable veil that held Arth’s atmosphere. Still, why grumble? They had deflected it. Now presumably they had to slow it down enough to maneuver it into the funnel of veiling that led to the rescue port.

4

It was close and fuggy inside the Celestial Omnibus. That hissing, Zillah thought. We’re all going to die. A voice spoke, from somewhere in the central part where no one could go. “Be calm,” it said. “Please attend.”

It was a deep male voice that struck ringing echoes from the walls in a way none of their own voices did. Marcus stirred at the sound of it and came awake quite peacefully. Even Judy stopped whimpering.

“I speak for the Brotherhood of Arth,” the voice continued. “Have no fear. The Goddess has permitted you to enter Arth. Our skills will bring you safely to the citadel. Be calm and you will see.”

The accent struck Zillah as Scottish at first, but it also had a burr to it that suggested Cornwall. Whatever, the deep, measured speech was decidedly soothing. Thank you! Bless you! she thought.

And thinking that, she found she could see the citadel the voice spoke of, in a sort of round white viewport that floated just in front of — or maybe just behind — her eyes. Marcus had no doubt that the sight was in front of him. He stretched out a starfish hand and made his pigeon noise. The place — building? — lay below like a toy, an improbable blue castle sprouting hornlike turrets in all directions from a flat base. Turrets and central block had windows of all sizes, but there seemed to be no doors. Some of the turrets supported open gold devices like crowns, multiple ladders, and many-petaled flowers.

A babble of exclamations greeted it from down the front end of the Celestial Omnibus, and Judy’s voice demanding, “What is it? What are you all looking at?”

He means just what he says — the voice — Zillah thought. If you don’t panic, you can see. Poor Judy.

She watched the castle enlarge with incredible swiftness. We are going fast. Will they ever stop us?

The thought had hardly entered her mind before something caught the Celestial Omnibus and steered it sharply away sideways. Gravity altered too, not so sharply, but inexorably. Zillah found herself able to stagger forward up the aisle and guide herself and Marcus into a seat not quite halfway along. Behind her, bodies of people she did not want to look at subsided to drape over seat-backs or flop into the gangway. Up front, Flan and Roz were forcing Judy into a seat.

None of this interfered with the vision of the castle. They were sweeping over it, above it, and down the other side.

“They’ve put us in a braking orbit, I think,” the gawky girl said very coolly from up front.

Must be that, Zillah thought, watching their dive to the flat base of the building and around underneath it. But here something decidedly odd happened. Instead of finding the Celestial Omnibus speeding along above the flat base, which surely ought to have appeared as a large disc, there was the merest blink of darkness, after which they were soaring up past the great blue walls of the fortress on the other side. It was as if the castle had no bottom at all — or one only a few feet across. There were exclamations from everyone about this, and then further exclamations as they all realized they were now much nearer the fortress and traveling at less than half the speed. As they swept over and above the multiple turrets this time, they were near enough to see several gardens, some in deep wells between turrets, and others niched high in among complex hornworks. A great open space appeared, beside the central block, and a tiny group of people hastening across it, who looked up and pointed. Then they were going down again, past blue walls and a hundred windows of many shapes.

This time, when they came up the other side after the blink of blackness, the Celestial Omnibus was virtually crawling. Now they were being maneuvered. The force that had sent them into that swift orbit had them again. This time it pulled. The Celestial Omnibus turned nose forward toward the vast building and jogged docilely inward.

Vast, Zillah thought, was too mild a word. The thing on a tower she had thought was like a golden flower must have been nearly a quarter of a mile across. It now — slightly — resembled a radio telescope dish. The multiple ladders on a more distant tower proved to be a structure several times the size of the Eiffel Tower. The walls of the outjutting horn-shaped tower they were approaching were built of square blocks of bluish stone that were each nearly the size of a house. Some of the windows were enormous. A slight shiver blurred her view as she wondered if the burring voice had belonged to a giant. Now they were approaching a medium-enormous bubblelike window.

“They have to be friendly after this,” Roz said. “Don’t they?”

“As long as they don’t find out where we come from,” Flan answered. “Let’s hope they believe our story.”

5

Nice work, Brothers! Tod thought, as the battered metal thing glided to a joggling halt between calipers that were the wrong shape and size to hold it. Whoever had made the object, on the other hand, had not done nice work at all. He could see welded plates starting apart all over it. More ominously, atmosphere was steaming in white clouds both from the rear and from the hatch, or door, in one side. The thing looked as if it had never been meant to withstand the forces between the worlds.

Tod sensed barriers go up behind him. The Brothers were protecting themselves and the rest of the rescue team from whatever was steaming out of the capsule. After that, veiling fell over capsule and calipers together, isolating Tod in with it.

“Can you manage to open that door, serviceman?” a telepathic voice inquired coldly.

No, Duty Mage, I am but a poor fool from the Pentarchy and only a seventh child at that. “I’ll have a try, sir,” Tod replied. Up with the old birthright then.

It took only the slightest shift of the Wheel to spring that leaking hatch cover right out and send it spiraling down the citadel wall below. As it clanged loose, Tod found himself gagging in the air that gusted forth. Someone had thrown up in there. Someone else was definitely dead. The rest had sweated like pigs. The veiling over his face cut none of that out at all. Why can’t they design it like a Frinjen wet suit? he wondered as he climbed inside. “Here comes the help! Anyone home?”

He met a chorus of thanks and relief. Two women thrust a third at him, who was blubbering and weeping. “Can you help Judy out? She’s gone to pieces.” Tod helped her to the platform with a will. Hysterical and red-eyed as she was, the girl was a good-looking blonde. Tod had not had his hands on a blonde for two months now. He discovered he missed the feeling after all. And missed brunettes too, he thought, as Roz and Flan jumped to the platform after Judy. The tall one in boots looked a bit masterful and strident, but the little ’un struck him as a sweetie. What fun! And what an embarrassment for the Brothers!

Tod was grinning, despite the stench, as he jumped up inside again and helped another woman down — this one a thin, staid creature who said gruffly, when he asked her, that the name was Helen.

“And I’m Roderick. Call me Tod,” he said. He turned to help the next, who was shaking all over, and found her, to his perplexity, to be an Azandi. “Hey! What are you doing here, my lady?” he asked.

“Wish the hell I knew, man,” she answered, in an accent that was most definitely not Azandi. “If I’d known this was going to happen, I’d have stayed safe in London. I’m Sandra. And the rest are dead. The crossing killed them. Believe me.”

She was right there. Just beyond the hatchway, the corpse of a good-looking boy lay half-across that of a comely young woman. Tod stepped over them and took a look along the capsule to make sure. And found Sandra had made a mistake. The best-looking one of all — an absolute wow-wow! — was coming slowly down the metal gangway carrying an infant.

“Not dead after all then?” Tod said to her. The infant responded with a broad, companionable smile.

“Ike boo how,” it remarked.

Zillah saw with interest that this cheerful young man, whose face gave her a feeling it was encased in an invisible nylon stocking, only hesitated an instant before correctly translating Marcus. “Like the blue house, do you, laddie? Well, that makes one of us. Your son, is he?” he asked Zillah.

She nodded. “Marcus. I’m Zillah. We were up the other end.”

There was more to it than that, Tod suspected. Why, he hadn’t even seen her until she was most of the way down the gangway. Nor, it seemed, had the other women. When Zillah climbed out through the doorway, she was greeted with astonishment.

“Good Lord! It’s Zillah — and Marcus!”

“Zillah, what the hell are you doing here? Why are the others dead?”

“Who is she?”

“Zillah Green, Helen — she’s Amanda’s sister.”

Zillah mumbled some reply, sounding so embarrassed that Tod turned away to the nearest corpse and began hauling it along the floor. But a man does not have six elder sisters for nothing. He did not make nearly as much noise dragging the dead young man as the castaways thought. He clearly caught the rapid whispering between the two brunettes and Zillah.

“Look, Zillah, how much do you know?”

“Well, the outline — What killed them? I don’t know—”

“Not the cover story and all that?”

“Obviously she doesn’t. Suppose they question us?”

“They’re bound to. Zillah, keep quiet and play dumb, there’s a love!”

“We’ll talk a lot. You just follow our lead.”

Ay, ay! Tod thought, backing from the door with the dead young man’s ankles in his hands. What are you up to, sisters? If you’re up to no good in Arth, then that’s fine by me. I won’t say a word to stop you!

It amused him the way they all sprang to help him, to allay his suspicions just in case he had heard anything. Flan and Roz jumped to the corpse’s arms, while Helen and Sandra raced inside to collect the girl. Zillah put Marcus down beside Judy. “Marcus, look after Judy. Mum’s got to go and help. Judy, have a go at holding Marcus — he’s awfully comforting to hold.” As she climbed into the capsule, she asked Tod, “Are you all on your own? Isn’t there anyone else in this castle to help you?”

Tod shot a look at the dark, filmy screen between them and the Brothers. They were all watching in there, and it looked as if they were now doing some kind of decontamination work. They were not going to risk plague. The platform was alight with small flashes, each representing the death of a microbe. “Oh, I’m in disgrace,” he said cheerfully, struggling rather to drag the dead young man to one side, out of Judy’s line of sight. He did not look plague-ridden to Tod’s eye, but why crossing to Arth should have killed such a healthy specimen was beyond Tod to say.

Here the Brotherhood condescended to lower the weight of things out on the platform. The heavy bodies suddenly became quite easy to handle. Tod found he could manage the next on his own, and Judy, sitting cross — legged with Marcus in her arms, was hanging on to the child as if she thought he might float away. In fact, had it not been for the sad gruesomeness of the work — which Tod saw was upsetting all the women — he would have enjoyed himself. Here were six new people to talk to, and females at that — with all the while the chuckle welling up inside him at how wonderfully awkward this was for Arth.

But of course, it was over quite soon. Five minutes hard work later, Tod’s suit became a fizzing scintilla of dying germs. Oh, so they did get around to me! he thought angrily. Simultaneously the dark screen cleared and busy, blue-clad Brothers rushed forth to deal with the capsule. Others swiftly shrouded the sad row of corpses, speculating in murmurs as to whether the cosmic storm or oxygen-loss could have killed them. Tod and the living ones were ushered through ranks of staring mages and goggling cadets, to where the High Head was standing, cloaked and mitred and stately.

The look on the High Head’s face, Tod thought he would never forget. It was almost horror, as the High Head realized all the survivors were women.