Too Many Magicians

by Randall Garrett

  Darcy and Ashley moved quickly to an empty spot at the bar. In spite of the number of customers the big room was not crowded.

  “See anybody we know?” murmured Lord Ashley.

  “Not from here,” Lord Darcy said. “She could be in one of those rear booths. Or possibly she hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “I think your second guess was correct,” Ashley said. “Take a look in the mirror behind the bar.”

  The mirror reflected the front door perfectly, and Lord Darcy easily recognized the tiny figure and beautiful face of Tia Einzig. As she walked across the room toward the back the identification was complete in Darcy’s mind. “That’s the girl,” he said. “Notice the high heels that Her Grace mentioned.”

  And, he realized, those heels also explained those clicking footsteps he had heard on St. Swithin’s Street. She hadn’t been more than thirty seconds behind Ashley and himself.

  * * * *

  Tia did not look around. She walked straight toward the rear as if she knew exactly where the person she was to meet would be waiting. She went directly to the last booth, near the back door of the pub, and slid in on the far side, facing the front door.

  “I wonder,” said Lord Darcy, “is there somebody already in that booth? Or is she waiting for the person who sent her the note?”

  “Let’s just stroll back and see,” said Lord Ashley.

  “Good, but don’t get too close. I don’t want either of them to see our faces.”

  “We could watch the dart game,” said Lord Ashley, “that might be interesting.”

  “Yes, let’s,” said Lord Darcy. They walked slowly back to the far end of the bar.

  There was someone in the booth, seated directly across from Tia Einzig. It was obviously a man, but the hood of the cloak completely concealed his face, and he kept his head bent low over the table.

  Lord Darcy said: “Let’s move over to that table. I want to see if I can hear their conversation. But move carefully. Keep your face concealed without being obvious about it.”

  The nearest table was further toward the front of the room than the booth that the two men were watching. They could no longer see the hooded man at all. His back was to them now and he kept his voice low, so that, while it was audible, it was not intelligible. Tia, however, was facing them, and, as Mary de Cumberland had told Lord Darcy the previous evening, the girl’s voice had abnormal carrying power, even when she did not speak loudly.

  For several seconds all they could hear was the low mutter of the man’s voice, then Tia said, “If you didn’t want him dead, why did you kill him?” Her expression was hard and cold, with an undertone of anger.

  More muttering, then Tia again: “You discovered that Zed, the much-feared head of Imperial Naval Intelligence in Europe, was actually Master Sir James Zwinge, and you mean to sit there and tell me that King Casimir’s Secret Service didn’t want him dead.”

  A couple of angry words from the hooded man.

  “I’ll talk any way I please,” said Tia. “You keep a civil tongue in your head.”

  She said nothing more for nearly a minute, as she listened to the hooded man with that unchanging stony expression of cold anger on her beautiful face. Then an icy smile came across her lips.

  “No, I will not,” she said. “I won’t ask him. Not for you, not for Poland, not for King Casimir’s whole damned army!”

  A short phrase from the hooded man. Tia’s cold smile widened just a trifle. “No, damn you, not for him either. And do you know why? Because I know now that you lied to me! Because I know now that he’s safe from the torture chambers of the Polish Secret Service!”

  The hooded man said something more. “Signing his death warrant?” She laughed sharply, without humor. “Oh no. You’ve harassed me long enough. You’ve tried to force me to betray a country that has been good to me, and a man who loves me. I’ve lived in constant fear and terror because of you, but no longer. Oh, I’m going to sign a death warrant all right—yours! I’m going to blow this whole plot sky high. I’m going to tell the Imperial authorities everything I know, and I hope they hang you, you vicious, miserable little …”

  She stopped suddenly and blinked. “What?” She blinked again.

  Lord Darcy, watching Tia’s face covertly from beneath his hood, saw her expression change. Where before it had been stony, now it became wooden. The cold expression became no expression at all.

  The Commander suddenly reached over and grabbed Darcy’s wrist.

  “Watch it!” he whispered harshly. “They’re going to leave by the back door!”

  Lord Darcy smiled inwardly. Lord Bontriomphe had mentioned that Ashley had occasional flashes of precognition, and here was an example of it. Such flashes came to an untrained Talent in moments of personal stress.

  As Ashley had predicted, Tia rose to her feet, as did the hooded man, his back still toward the watchers. The hooded man did not turn. Tia did, and the two of them walked directly out the back door, only a few feet away.

  Darcy and the Commander were on their feet, heading toward the back door. Then Lord Darcy stopped, his hand on the doorknob.

  “What are you waiting for?” Ashley asked.

  “I want them to get far enough ahead so that they won’t notice the light when I open this door.”

  “But we’ll lose them in this fog!”

  “Not with those high heels of hers. You can hear them ten yards away.”

  He eased the door open a trifle. “Hear that? They’re moving away toward our right. What street is this?”

  “This would be Old Barnegat Road,” said Lord Ashley.

  “All right, let’s go.” Lord Darcy swung open the door and the two men stepped out into the billowing fog. The steady clicking of Tia’s heels was still clearly audible.

  “Let’s close up the distance,” Lord Darcy said as they walked steadily through the shrouded darkness. “If we walk quietly, they won’t notice our footsteps over the sound of hers.”

  The two men said nothing for several minutes as they followed the beacon of sound that came from Tia’s heels. Then, in a low voice, Lord Ashley said, “You know, I didn’t understand much of that conversation back at the pub—but I guess I should be thankful I could understand any of it at all.”

  “Why?” asked Lord Darcy.

  “I had rather assumed it would be in Polish. We know the Einzig girl speaks Polish and the note indicates that the man does, too.”

  “Quite the contrary,” said Lord Darcy. “The note indicates that the man has a slight acquaintance with the Polish tongue, but hardly enough to carry on a lengthy conversation in it. The Poles differentiate between a ‘hound’ and a ‘dog’ just as we do. Yet in translating ‘Hound and Hare’ into Polish, he used the Polish word for ‘dog,’ which no one who was conversant with the language would have done. And that tells us a great deal more about the man we are following.”

  “In what way, my lord?”

  “That he is vain, pretentious, and has an overdeveloped sense of the melodramatic. He could quite as easily have written the note in Anglo-French, yet he did not. Why?”

  “Perhaps because he felt that it would not be understood by anyone else who happened to see it.”

  “Precisely; and you have fallen into the same error he did. Only a man who is unfamiliar with a language thinks of it as a kind of secret writing. Do you think of Anglo-French as a cryptic language with which to conceal your thoughts from others?”

  “Hardly,” said Lord Ashley with a smile.

  “But even so,” Lord Darcy said softly, “only a vain, pretentious man would attempt to show off his patently poor knowledge of a language to a person whose native tongue it is.”

  At a corner ahead of them, the sound of Tia’s heels turned again to the right. “Where are we now?” Lord Darcy asked.

  “If I haven’t lost my bearings, we just passed Great Harlow House; that means they turned on Thames Street, heading roughly south.”

  Lord Darcy wished, not for
the first time, that he knew more about the geography of London. “Have you any idea where they’re going?” he asked.

  “Well, if we keep on this way,” said Lord Ashley, “we’ll pass St. Martin’s Church and end up smack in the middle of Westminster Palace.”

  “Don’t tell me they’re going to see the King,” said Lord Darcy. “I really don’t believe I could swallow that.”

  “Wait, they’re turning left.”

  “Where would that be?”

  “Somerset Bridge,” Lord Ashley said. “They’re crossing the river. We’d better drop back a little. There are lights on the bridge.”

  “I think not,” said Lord Darcy. “We’ll take our chances.”

  “How much longer are they going to keep walking?” Lord Ashley muttered. “Are they out on a pleasant evening stroll to Croydon or something?”

  The lights on the bridge did not hamper them in any way. They were widely spaced, and the fog was so dense, especially here over the Thames, that someone standing directly under a gas lamp could not be seen from fifteen feet away. They kept walking at a steady pace.

  Suddenly the clicking stopped, somewhere near the middle of the bridge. Automatically the two men also stopped. Then they heard a single sentence, muffled but clearly intelligible: “Now climb up on the balustrade.”

  “Good God!” said Darcy. “Let’s go!”

  The two men broke into a run. Caution now was out of the question. The hooded man came suddenly into sight, through the veil of fog. He was standing near one of the gas lamps. Tia Einzig was nowhere to be seen. From the river below came the sound of a muffled splash.

  At the sound of footsteps the hooded man turned, his face still hidden, shadowed from the overhead light by the hood of his cloak. He froze for a second as if deciding whether or not to run. Then he realized it was too late, that his pursuers were too close for him to escape. His right hand dived beneath his cloak and came out again with a smallsword. Its needlelike blade gleamed in the foggy light.

  The Imperial Navy’s training was such that Commander Lord Ashley’s reaction was almost instinctive. His own narrow-bladed sword came from its scabbard and into position before the hooded man could attack.

  “Take care of him!” Lord Darcy shouted. “I’ll get the girl!” He was already racing across the bridge to the downstream side, opening his cloak and dropping it behind him as he ran. He vaulted to the top of the broad stone balustrade, stood for a moment, then took a long clean dive into the impenetrable blackness below.

  16

  Commander Lord Ashley did not see Lord Darcy’s dive from the bridge. His eyes had not for a second left the hooded figure that faced him in the tiny area of mist-filled light beneath the gas lamp. He felt confident, sure of himself. The way the other man had drawn his sword proclaimed him an amateur.

  Then, as his opponent came in suddenly, he felt an odd surge of fear. The sword in the other man’s hand seemed to flicker and vanish as it moved!

  It was only by instinct and pure luck that he managed to avoid the point of the other’s sword and parry the thrust with his own blade. And still his eyes could not find that slim, deadly shaft of steel. It was as if his eyes refused to focus on it, refused to look directly at it.

  The next few seconds brought him close to panic as thrust after thrust narrowly missed their mark, and his own thrusts were parried easily by a blade he could not see, a blade he could not find.

  Wherever he looked, it was always somewhere else, moving in hard and fast, with strikes that would have been deadly, had his own sword not somehow managed to ward them off each time. His own thrusts were parried again and again, for each time the other blade neared his own, his eyes would uncontrollably look away.

  He did not need to be told that this was sorcery. It was all too apparent that he was faced with an enchanted blade in the hands of a deadly killer.

  And then the Commander’s own latent, untrained Talent came to the fore. It was a Talent that was rare even in the Sorcerers Guild. It was an ability to see a very short time into the future, usually only for seconds, and—very rarely—for whole minutes.

  The Guild could train most men with that Talent; these were the sorcerers who predicted the weather, warned of earthquakes, and foresaw other natural phenomena that were not subject to the actions of men. But, as yet, not even the greatest thaumaturgical scientists had devised a method of training the Commander’s peculiar ability. For that ability was the rarest of all—the ability to predict the results of the actions of men. And since the thaumaturgical laws of time symmetry had not yet been fathomed, that kind of Talent still could not be brought to the peak of reliability that others had been.

  The Commander had occasional flashes of precognition, but he never knew when they would come nor how long he could sustain their flow. But, like any other intelligent man who has what he knows is an accurate hunch, Commander Lord Ashley was capable of acting upon it.

  Quite suddenly, he realized that he had known instinctively, with each thrust, where that ensorcelled blade was going to be. The black sorcerer who sought to kill him might have trained Talent on his side, but he could not possibly cope with Commander Lord Ashley’s hunches.

  Once he realized that, Ashley’s eyes no longer sought the enemy’s blade, or the arm that held it. They watched the body of his opponent. It moved from one position to another as though posing for sketches in a beginner’s textbook. But he could have kept his eyes closed and still known.

  For a little while, Ashley did nothing but ward off the other’s attacks, getting the feel of the black sorcerer’s sword work. But he was no longer retreating.

  He began to move in. Step by step he forced his opponent back. Now they were directly beneath the gas lamp again. Lord Ashley could tell that the other man was beginning to lose his confidence. His thrusts and parries were less certain. Now the panic and fear were all on the other side.

  With careful deliberation, Commander Lord Ashley plotted out his own course of action. He did not want this man dead; this sorcerer and spy must be arrested, tried, and hanged, either for the actual murder of Sir James Zwinge, or for having ordered it done. There was no doubt in Lord Ashley’s mind as to the guilt of this black sorcerer, but it would be folly to kill him, to take the King’s Justice into his own hands.

  He knew, now, that it would be easy to take his opponent alive. It would require only two quick moves: a thrust between elbow and wrist to disarm the man, and then a quick blow to the side of his head with the flat of the blade to knock him senseless.

  Lord Ashley made two more feints to move his opponent back and get him in just the right position to receive the final thrust. The sorcerer retreated as though he were obeying orders—which, indeed, he was: the orders of the lightning-swift sword in the Commander’s hand.

  Now the gas lamp was at Ashley’s back, and for the first time the light fell full upon the face beneath the hood.

  Lord Ashley smiled grimly as he recognized those features. Taking this man in would be a pleasure indeed!

  Then the moment came. Ashley began his lunge toward the sorcerer’s momentarily unprotected forearm.

  It was at that moment that he felt his Talent desert him. He had become overconfident, and the psychic tension, which had sustained his steady flow of accurate hunches, had fallen below the critical threshold.

  His left foot slipped on the fog-damp pavement of the bridge.

  He tried to regain his balance but it was too late. In that moment, he could almost feel death.

  But he had already thrown the fear of death so deeply into his opponent that the sorcerer did not see the opening as a chance to kill. He only saw that, for a moment, the deadly Naval sword no longer threatened him. His cloak swirled around him as he turned and ran, vanishing into the surrounding fog as though he had never been.

  Lord Ashley kept himself from falling flat on his face by catching his weight on his outstretched left arm. Then he was back on his feet, and a stab of pain went throug
h his right ankle. He could hear the running steps of the sorcerer fading into the distance, but he knew he could never catch him trying to run on a twisted ankle.

  He braced himself against the balustrade for a moment and gave in to the laughter that had been welling up ever since he had seen that twisted, frightened face. The laughter was at himself, basically. To think that, for a few seconds, he had actually been deathly afraid of that obsequious little worm, Master Ewen MacAlister!

  It took half a minute or so for the laughter to subside. Then he pulled a deep breath of fog-laden air into his lungs, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his left hand. Deftly, he slid his sword back into its sheath.

  It was too bad, he thought, that a spot of slippery pavement had prevented him from capturing Master Ewen, but at least the identity of the black sorcerer was now known, and Lord Darcy could—

  Lord Darcy!

  The haze of excitement cleared from his brain, and he limped across the bridge to the balustrade on the downstream side.

  Black as pitch down there. He could see nothing.

  “Darcy!” the Commander’s voice rang out across the water, but the dense fog that brooded over the river seemed to distort and disperse the sound before it traveled far. There was no answer.

  Twice more he called, and still there was no answer.

  He heard rapid footsteps coming from his right and turned to face them, his hand on the hilt of his narrow-bladed sword.

  MacAlister returning? It couldn’t be! And yet …

  Damn the fog! He felt as though he were isolated in a little world of his own, whose boundaries were a bank of cotton wool a dozen feet away, and which was surrounded by invisible beings that were nothing but disembodied footsteps.

  Then he saw a glow of light, and out of the cotton wool came a friendly figure, carrying a pressure-gas lantern. Lord Ashley didn’t know the big, heavy man, but the black uniform of a London Armsman made him a friend. The Armsman slowed, stopped, and put his hand on the hilt of his own smallsword. “May I ask what’s going on here, sir?” he inquired politely. But his eyes were wary.